Your opinion is popular but fundamentally wrong. Technology moves on by the time all the navel-gazers (incl. you and me here) finished these 'sports bar' like discussions, where everyone is an expert of a sport they might not have ever played.
Typical IT complaint:)
My opinion is fundamentally correct. People are just missing the point.
Raising questions about how well a system will work and what problems need to be addressed, is not "nay-saying" or pessimism, but reality.
I think we can do better than single out high occupancy lanes for initial use. There are a billion creative ideas for the use of autonomous driving that may be early adopter areas. Can you make a list?
I could make a HUGE list. It's all irrelevant though till the fundamental problem is solved.
What matters is not whether there will be cases where a machine is inferior to a human, or whether there will be a machine-caused accident or not. The question is whether the loss attributed to machines is significantly lower (besides the existence of other benefits) or not. If this is the case, there is a huge economic imperative to use the technology, making the transition inevitable (it's not a naysayer's slashdot post that will halt progress).
Self-parking cars lead to automated valet errands. Volvo's traffic monitoring will lead to highway autopilot. Etc. etc. Maybe the first autonomous car that you buy will not be advertised as such. Maybe it'll be advertised as a car that can safely stop with you (whatever traffic situation you happen to be in) if you get a heart attack, while it just informs you of stuff in normal operation. It's an inevitable march, and by the time those who say "the question is not technology, but society's acceptance" have the chance of analysing the heck out of the subject, all of us will essentially sit in self-driving cars. By the time we reached conclusion on urban impact, climate change etc., as a method of transport, cars have pushed aside horses and their loyal fans.
This is the problem, and why my opinion is fundamentally correct, and also why we are discussing Google's cars in an article dedicated to autopilot software on planes.
Pilots are highly trained people. There is a wealth of knowledge and math that is required to be a pilot. If it was so easy to get a pilot's license (never mind the requirements for jumbo jets) then more people would have them. They don't.
The transition between auto-pilot and pilot is very forgiving compared to the transition between auto-driver and driver.
Does a pilot have another jumbo jet 3 feet in front of it, or 3 feet to the side? Let's look at it in terms of reaction time. Does a pilot ever have to react within a couple of seconds to objects around him? In a scenario that does not involve dirty underwear and an investigation by the FAA?
No.
Drivers have to react all the time to objects that are mere seconds or less from impacting them depending on their decisions. People take driving for granted without realizing just how dangerous it really is. Not surprising since the number of people that have a decent grasp on physics and math is pretty low in the US.
That is the fundamental problem that needs to be addressed and why my opinion and observation is fundamentally correct.
In a mixed system of auto-drivers and drivers, the auto-drivers will, on average, do as well as the drivers in terms of not hitting something else. They will not have any increased efficiency in traffic since they will have the same problem. Human drivers lack a good ability to cooperate with another in a highly coordinated fashion due to the inherent selfishness of the species it seems, as well as the problem of communicating and processing that much data with other humans.
Not impossible though. I have witnessed something seemingly supernatural in China where a city predominated by
It's not about choosing one or the other, but hybrid systems operating at the same time.
If you are going to compare quality, the human will win every time. We can give anecdotal evidence about how bad drivers are, but statistics show that driving is not so dangerous that we need to consider stopping it altogether. Really think about it for a second. During your average day, how many really bad drivers did you personally interact with that created a dangerous situation resulting in an accident? Pretty low huh? I would expect so, otherwise insurance would cost thousands and thousands per month, instead of per year.
Humans are not the inferior solution overall right now. Not by far.
It is also not because Google is not perfect either. Specifically, it is because of the time required, and the complexity of shifting control from Google to the driver. Once such a system becomes normal to a driver, their attention is not going to be on the road, but on their interaction with other devices. You cannot reasonably expect a person to be in complete awareness, hands at 10-2, ready in a split second to take control. You would get too bored without immediate feedback, your mind would drift. This would be completely normal too.
This is not to say that the system itself might not be useful, but it would have to be under very controlled conditions excluding human drivers altogether. It could work, provided the shifting of control was at a controlled rate in relatively controlled conditions. Give the human being time to adapt and obtain situational awareness.
As cool as this sounds, it is just not ready to fully replace a human, unless it could perform at a human level or better. The dream of a car that can drive itself completely under all conditions is still some ways away.
The idea of changing carpool lanes over to high efficiency lanes where human control is not allowed seems like a more pragmatic approach that decreases the complexity and uncertainty that the Google system has to deal with. It has very high value as well since it can optimize traffic patterns far better than a human simply because it can cooperate with a much larger number of cars over greater distances. A human could never hope to do that with our inherent limitations.
That system could realize some serious fuel savings and increase productivity by essentially mimicking an airplane in auto pilot mode. The human is really just there to get the system to the point where it can safely transition in and out of a computer controlled lane. That will be extremely advantageous to overall traffic.
The same battle is being replayed with smart phones and BYOD. And the IT High Priests will lose again.
There is your first problem. Calling IT "High Priests". You make them the enemy and fight every single thing like a complete idiot, "just because", and you are making things worse. IT is there to enable the other employees to get their work done, but they are also there to protect to the company.
Strike a BALANCE between APPROPRIATE security and usability, or your IT department will be outsourced.
That is not balance and BYOD is not appropriate. The threat of outsourcing creates duress, which automatically creates the absence of balance.
It is impossible to have even an adequate level of security with BYOD. It does not even make any sense in Enterprise cases anyways.
You can have a defeatist attitude, but stopping BYOD is so easy you don't even have to have the confrontational battle you so desperately seek. The idea of BYOD to replace corporate equipment is just retarded. It will be a fad, and then there will be the absolute fucking horror stories with price tags attached to steep, that even the most pointiest of the pointy haired bosses will think twice before pushing it.
BYOD, that accompanies corporate equipment is entirely possible in the ways that I outlined. Keep it on separate networks and keep it from interacting with corporate hardware.
Path Of Least Resistance.
Why have the employees fight you? The idea is to be the people they come to for answers. The people that can tell them how to solve problems, how to be secure, etc. How to best accomplish something with the least amount of effort.
I get called over sometimes for something as simple as help with an Excel spreadsheet formula and advice on a home system. I don't really mind if I have the time.
By building such strong relationships built on trust and mutual respect, the employees want to cooperate. They don't see you as the dickhead trying to prevent them from hitting a website up during lunch, but the guy that gives them a safe alternative and is willing to stand up to the execs to allow their personal phones to connect to Facebook without issue.
The employees that just don't get it, I come down with the wrath of the gods on them and make their little lives so fucking miserable that when I show them the path of least resistance they run towards it and never screw with me again.
Truth be told, I have only had to make an example a couple of times and the word gets out even to the new people about the right way to do things.
Only in your wildest IT Nerd dreams could you punish a user severely just because they found a way to check their GMail account from "your" network.
I already have. 1st time was a warning. 2nd time involved Hamachi installed on a corporate machine to try and get around the corporate firewall and controlling a home PC. 3 days suspended without pay and a complete rebuild of the workstation from the ground up.
Try having the VP of Sales fired for that.
Punish severely does not mean fired. If it comes to a VP, I just talk to the VP and explain what the legal liabilities are and how much it costs when they screw up. You must have missed the part about providing a path of least resistance. If I give the VP a way to conduct personal actions that don't put the company at risk, a VP is generally smart enough to want to do it.
Even if he does cause a data breach, he'll just make sure you get blamed for that because he is far more skilled in organizational politics then you could ever be.
That won't make one bit of difference when the logs show otherwise. A 3rd party audit from a security firm will only validate what I have said anyways. Sure the veep might not get fired, but behind closed doors, there will be hell to pay if he really exposed the company to that level of liability, and more hell to pay it it tarnished the reputation of the company and clients/customers had to be notified. Even worse in a regulated industry.
Now if you are talking about the levels of corruption to the point where all the execs cover up each others fuck ups and lie to regulators.... well then you would be pretty stupid to stay at that company if you had any knowledge of what was going on. I quit a company that I thought *might* be doing questionable things and you can bet your ass I took evidence with me that I was in compliance with all regulations and dotted every "i" and crossed every "t".
There are two "brains" that can operate the car. Google can make a pretty decent brain, but it is not going to come remotely close (in any way) to the human brain in terms of its ability to perceive the environment (sensors), make sense of it (pattern recognition), and put it all into context (experience, extrapolation).
Google will excel in reaction times and advanced planning. Through Google it will be possible to mitigate traffic by solving a very human problem, which is cooperation towards a common goal. Google could react faster, and with less overcompensation, to a car drifting into its lane.
Where Google will fall far short is recognizing the road rage in the driver next to it (beating his hands on the steering wheel and screaming), the lack of concentration (woman putting her lipstick on), etc. Putting those things in context and assigning risk to drivers next to you is not something Google will be able to do from its sensors. However, even the average driver is getting cues in so many ways about what is really going on around them.
The reason why it is a bad idea, is that while Google is operating, the human brain is off. It's not instant-on either. Driving is a constant level of concentration, even when it seems like you are doing it "subconsciously". From start to finish, the average driver is pretty aware of their surroundings and processing an impressive amount of data. A human brain will beat Google every time on those terms.
When Google fails, or "judges" the environment poorly, how quickly can the human brain come back online, evaluate the current environment, take control, and make the required adjustments?
Until the Google brain is able to fully replace a human brain, it is not a good idea to involve the two in a hybrid system. The lag between the two systems taking control from one another is just too great.
Self-parking is fine, and limited operations involving high efficiency traffic lanes where human control is not permitted will be fine. As long as the transition into those operations is in a time frame a human can deal with.
Example being, the human brain pulls the car along the high efficiency traffic lane, "tags" the Google brain in to insert itself into the traffic. The Google brain then notifies the driver and validates proper control and awareness before exiting the traffic and turning control over to the human driver. Failure means Google pulls the car to the left in the emergency lane and brings the car to a full stop.
Any other kind of operations just seems fundamentally unwise to me because of the hybrid nature and inherent limitations of Google's AI, advanced as it may be for now.
My threshold for letting a computer operate a car no differently than a human, is the computer can meet or exceed the human's ability in every respect. That is not true right now, and will not be true for decades.
You may trust a Google car more than the average driver, but that is only really true if the Google car also has no driver.
Most people are lazy and don't feel they have the need to encrypt their communications. If they are willing to post the shit they do on Facebook, they are already a lost cause from a privacy/anonymity viewpoint.
Setting up email to send encrypted payloads is not easy for most people, and the people that know how, quickly lose interest after spending an hour to set up one person.
Now, all of my emails *are* encrypted, and not just in transit. I use a special IMAP connector for Outlook that encrypts all traffic with SSL to the mail server. The web portal for my email server is encrypted with SSL as well. Where *possible* my mail server will negotiate a secure connection to a remote server, but that is pretty damn rare. On my personal computer the message store is located on a TrueCrypt drive, so if my computer is lost or stolen, I am not worried about the message store, which is temporary anyways since the email is stored on the server.
All of it is pointless if the other party is not doing the same exact thing, which is most of the time. So I never send anything in the clear that I don't want analyzed, categorized, and used by private corporations and government.
For correspondence that needs to remain secure I usually set up an email account on the same server. That way everything is encrypted down to the message store and emails sent between domains hosted on the same mail server are just internally routed.
This is the same reason why truly secure phone calls are next to impossible in systems that must be able to perform call setups to any other phone. Too many intermediary points that cannot handle it. ZRTP, while interesting, is a long way from implementation, and will never address insecure endpoints like landlines and cell phones.
It's the other end that is problem, just as you say, but it is also the points in between. As long as there are free services that won't waste the CPU cycles to negotiate encryption between mail servers, it does not make that much sense.
Bottom line, I am secure where I need to be, not through encryption specifically, but choosing what I say, when I say it, and what communications medium I choose.
Employees are advised that access to personal email on corporate equipment is expressly prohibited and punishable all the way up to dismissal. Follow through on it. Corporate networks have active firewalls to prevent access to most personal email portals and log the crap out of everything. Follow up on the logs. Identify employees that have done so, and punish them severely . Make an example.
I have gone so far as to have a white list only intercepting proxy between the corporate machines and the Internet that prevents most of what you are concerned about.
Depending on how far you want to take it, there are many security concepts like data diodes, and advanced security platforms that you can implement with respect to data.
Like I said in another post.. path of least resistance. You can go full TOP SECRET security level practices, or just have an intercepting proxy with logging. Employees from workstations should never ever have access to the full database. Just systems that are secure themselves performing API calls to back-end database servers that do not have any direct access to corporate/branch office networks.
In the end, of course there is some form of connection. Balance between security and usability.....
Not really. It depends on your point of view and where you see yourself in the balance between security and usability.
Remember, we are talking about corporations here. Not just small businesses here either, but large ones implied by the term "financial institutions".
Medium sized businesses to Enterprise businesses have serious security issues to address. Fail to address them, or to even understand them, is what leads to security "incidents" that compromise your customers, impact your current operations, tarnish your reputation, and are costly to fix.
"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".
You may say I am being overboard here, but that really does depend on the environment and situation. With financial data I would never even allow branch offices or executives direct access to any data at all. If they want something with credit card numbers or soc#, I would give them the bin/last4 of the credit card and last4 of the social.
I guess what it really comes down to is you are serious about the security of your system. You seem to have an impression that I am out of balance and a tyrant running IT whipping the employees.
Not so. If you read my post, I actively work with the employees to reach an understanding on what is dangerous and can hurt us. Locking down the network, gluing USB ports shut, and participating in a cold war with employees is fruitless. It just makes them resent you, and executives can override you anyways.
Give them options that make sense that still allow them to have a good experience. Public network access that does not represent a security risk is a good start. It not only allows employees a place to safely interact with the rest of the Internet, but guests of the company as well.
I have advised executives countless times to ignore personal email, Facebooking, etc. As long as work is getting done and you don't see them doing it more than the amount of their break times, leave it alone. If the employee can responsibly balance their time while responding to txt's or twits, or whatever, while accomplishing their tasks, deliverables, etc. let them have that leeway.
How are so lenient policies so far out there? If anything it is pragmatic with respect to human behavior. Offer a path of least resistance.
Then in the end they get their asses handed to them hard, and by hard, I mean reaalllly hard.
No competent IT person will ever agree to allow BYOD to propagate through the workplace. Not with access to any kind of sensitive data whatsoever that is not already passing through secured portals.
Secured websites that allow access, that they themselves are limited in what they can show, is one thing. That allows functionality not just in the workplace, but in the field. It also allows a lot more freedom in what kind of devices can be used. Tablets, phones, computers, etc. Freedom in operating systems is great too. If the employee can get everything done in a web browser, then you don't need the expensive Windows fat clients.
Bring your own personal computer in to work? Only the executives would think of something so "full-retard" like that.
I have always locked corporate down harder than East Germany. Nobody even knows the wireless passwords to access the corporate network, and executives who demand business laptops, get them configured by IT. Some places even get the Ethernet locked down further so that unauthorized devices cannot connect. They don't know the passwords either. No stupid Facebook, Twitter, etc. from within the corporate network.
To make it easier, I just provide a public wireless network with a simple password for all the employees to use. Separate IP address space, and not even remotely connected to the corporate network and VPNs. If they want Facebook, Twitter, and all the Social Media crap plus media streaming of YouTube, Pandora, etc. they can do it on another network that won't impact corporate operations. I make it a clear policy that they can use the public network with their own devices in any way they want because it is safer. The only thing they are not allowed to do is directly transfer or connect their devices to corporate hardware. You make it reasonable like that, and the vast majority of employees are happy and not trying to bypass your corporate security to get to Facebook while on break.
Security and Usability is a balancing act.
If the company execs want to shove Usability down IT's throat, despite common sense and valid warnings, and at the expense of security, just to gain some perceived ability to work employees harder for the bottom line... then get your resume ready to jump ship.
You will have to jump ship. I have to be skeptical about this. Financial institutions and highly regulated companies doing this? I have to doubt this. Any security company that comes in to audit them or evaluate their security is going to have a field day killing several trees with reports to the execs about how insecure and vulnerable their network is. Would it pass PCI compliance? Doubtful.
All it takes is one really bad screwup. Lose a half million credit numbers (with full info) and then the executives might really understand the cost of letting employees bring in their tainted malware infested, porn overloaded, crap equipment from home.
I write this while downloading an ISO to fix an executives business laptop that they crapped up with malware.
It's already a never ending battle for IT to keep the corporate network and assets from being owned by hackers and malware. Handcuffing us and force marching us down a path to the 9th level of IT hell is just an oh-so-good idea. There is a really really good reason why IT has to control all hardware connected up to corporate. Any hardware we don't control is not just a point of failure, but a security vulnerability waiting to be exploited.
How many hacking groups out there are just waiting for that "big fat gold nugget" that is a laptop being connected up to a major financial institution from the inside?
If they contractually allow a 3rd party access to the system programmatically (API) to perform whatever actions are allowed by policy (which is wide open apparently) it not the API provider that is responsible for the actions.
UMG is actively policing the content in question, and UMG is the one performing the deletions directly via the API according to the article. This does not involve the specific knowledge, nor intent, of Google to police anything.
They are specifically allowing UMG to police their content, which means.... they are not doing it themselves. You cannot make them complicit in these actions simply because you want it to be so.
As it relates to the safe harbor status in the DMCA, Google would not be actively policing its own content, and therefore losing the status.
Whether or not Google is correct in this, ethical, or "being evil" is immaterial to the specific question at hand, which is, "Is Google actively policing its own content?".
Gift giving for nieces is simple. When in doubt - give chocolate. Because chocolate never goes out of style. If you've ever tasted some of the more expensive specialty chocolates, you'll know what I mean. Think of the sweatiest, dirtiest, raunchiest, kinkiest sex you ever had - and multiply by two. It's that good.
3 little observations.
1) You're giving your nieces something better than the best sex you ever had? I don't know if that is just really perverted, or the best Aunt ever. All relative I guess.
2) This is Slashdot. Anything multiplied by zero is... ummmm. zero.
3) Can you post a link to those specific chocolates? 7 days till Christmas so there is still time left for ordering.
You're arguing semantics here, and I think you are wrong.
If I offer an API for my website services and you use it to delete something, did you delete it, or did I delete it?
Personally, I was completely unaware of it while it was happening and did not have any input. My API did not seek my input on your deletion request.
According to the article, Google granted UMG access via their API to do just that. That is *not* Google actively policing their content. Google has stepped back and allowed UMG to act "arbitrarily".
Google is not doing anything at the behest of UMG. They entered a contractual agreement with UMG in which UMG has the right to delete videos at their sole discretion apparently.
If you can get a contract with Google allowing you the same level of access, ostensibly via API, then you can make those decisions too.
Not arguing that Google is right to agree to it, only that they don't meet the definition of "actively policing their content" with the aforementioned implications withe the DMCA's safe harbor status. This is completely 3rd party.
You can't just pass a law saying that all cars must get 100 MPG, and then leave it to the engineers to make your law so. It would obviously lead to disaster.
This is business as usual, and not just in the US.
Dilbert, while funny, is depressingly accurate.
The vast majority of marketers, executives, etc. really do think they can just order the engineers and IT department to "make it so". When the IT department comes back and says, "You are asking us to violate the laws of physics and alter reality to create a floating Unicorn that is as "smart" as Suri, and shits out candy corn", they get branded as "Not Team Players".
Part of the reason why IT is hated so much, is that we are telling them what they can't do more often then what they can do. It's not pessimism either, which really gets under my skin, but just reality.
When IT has no clout either, they end up having to break systems to get to them to do what they were never intended to do, or do things that clearly make the system itself unstable.
Happens all the time. Rarely, do you see a system that is a harmony of perfection. The ones that come close..... have upper management made up of IT people. I kid you not, some of the most advanced platforms I have seen recently in some industries have been developed by engineers and IT people leaving companies to make new ones.
The Internet is far worse. Let's not kid ourselves here either. While I have a superficial understanding of BGP routing, and the complexities involved in DNS, secure DNS, etc. I am not an expert either. So when most of IT out there does not really understand the core workings of the Internet, you can't expect the PHB's in Congress to have any clue, and it becomes perfectly understandable that they would expect it "to just work". Corporations and engineers waive their hands and do their Matrix thing in the backrooms, and it get's done.
What is missing are the middle men. The people that can explain to the Congress Critters in terms they can understand, "It's bad. Can't be done like that, Mkay".
Where are they experts here? What really surprises me is that the telecoms are not screaming their heads off through their purchased channels at their paid for politicians that it's a bad idea.
Must be because Big Content is paying more right now for influence than the telecoms......
I actually saw something like a documentary of how fast food commercials get made.
There was no food in the hamburger, or the fries. I swear, I thought they said the mayo dripping off the sides was white shower caulk. The cheddar cheese was shiny plastic, the buns were foam, etc.
That hamburger was about as edible as a Mr. Potato Head. Which really is not accurate now that I think of it, because I seem to remember eating one in kindergarten.
All the display case samples, similar to the ones you see on the walls in some places, is what they were photographing.
You can't photoshop an actual hamburger to look like that.
cosmetic
(kz-mtk) n. 1. A preparation, such as powder or a skin cream, designed to beautify the body by direct application. 2. Something superficial that is used to cover a deficiency or defect. adj. 1. Serving to beautify the body, especially the face and hair. 2. Serving to modify or improve the appearance of a physical feature, defect, or irregularity: cosmetic surgery. 3. a. Decorative rather than functional: cosmetic fenders on cars. b. Lacking depth or significance; superficial: made a few cosmetic changes when she took over the company.
Which man, that is attracted to women, uses powders or skin creams regularly? I don't know any either.
Superficial stuff to cover a deficiency or defect? I don't think Just For Men qualifies, but maybe tangentially at best.
Serving to beautify the body, especially face and hair. No on that as well. Old Spice does not count as a cosmetic. All the scented shampoos and body washes get purchased because of all the commercials that imply it creates a "pussy gravity well" in which pussy is drawn towards you inexorably, specifically towards your penis. It has nothing to do with the fact it makes your hair look good.
Google is not actively policing its own content, UMG is. I am sure as part of the licensing agreement Google is absolved of any liability as it has become UMG's responsibility to police the content.
I would not be surprised if Google has quietly done this with all "big" (read enough money to sue them) content distributors so that they don't have to do anything.
ContentID was a massive failure. It never actually worked right and the copyright owners were swamped with "spam" notifications that turned out to be nothing, or worse, they took down everything. The resultant complaints, from people like me, that showed the ContentID system was fundamentally flawed and taking down videos without cause gave Google a difficult problem to solve. In my own case, the videos were only flagged and no action was taken. That was from a single copyright owner though, that probably made the decision to not do anything. UMG I bet would have acted differently.
Your concerns are mitigated through whatever contractual agreements that Google has with UMG.
Also the cost of potential data leaks due to unpatched/unsupported/unsafe browsers totally shadows the cost of upgrading a shitty intranet website.
That's completely irrelevant if the company is floundering and the costs are so high, that they might as well be infinite.
So if people have "budget constraints" about this, they don't understand the concept of security and how it can hurt their business.
No.. It's worse than that. Most of them do, they just keep deciding to *not* fire Bob so that his salary can pay for the team of developers to spend weeks upgrading them to the latest and greatest MS technologies.
So far you have spoken about internal websites. What about external websites?
Vendor-lock-in is not pretty. When you have one or more 3rd party companies providing a service that you cannot operate without, you have no choice but to use IE6. It is simplistic to take a hard line approach and just get rid of them, if that is even possible.
Which is why, there are some Windows Server 2003 installations that actually have IE6 running on them specifically so remote desktop sessions can access these 3rd party vendors.
When there is no money for additional development, and the money to retrain staff and purchase different platforms do not exist, and 3rd party vendors to replace those still stuck on IE6, you have real problems.
As far as forewarning, the writing has been on the wall for YEARS. Like I said, no money is the bigger issue. Considering how hard the economies of the world right now are being hit, performing actions that can push small businesses under will only add to our problems.
If MS really wanted to solve the problem they could identify those businesses in trouble, and offer help in transitioning the platforms. In truth, switching all those older platforms out with professional help from MS might cost them 20-30 million dollars, or more. The PR would be invaluable, and quite frankly, MS should try giving something back when they have already taken so much. You might be thinking why should MS shoulder any responsibility? They wrote they farking thing in the first place, and unlike struggling small business, MS has the money and ability to do it.
But your right. Let's just switch it off and those who can survive, will survive. If Bob loses his job because the company cannot adapt, that's life and Bob should have had a plan. Meanwhile, his wife Lucine, with breast cancer, can just figure out how to pay for their medications and treatment without medical benefits paid for by the company.
Laws apply to the Plebs. Laws do not apply to those in power. Those in power make the laws.
Eventually, the Plebs get fed up with the bullshit and kill those in power. Some of the Plebs get used to the benefits and trappings of power. They cease to be Plebs.
Posting a full song online is not illegal. Illegal specifically means against the law. They are trying to change and pervert the law all the time, so who really knows when even thinking about a song without authorization is actually against a law, but today posting a song is not illegal.
Copyright law structures the copyright and enumerates and defines the rights (legal entitlements). If you have violated copyright law, which meets the definition of illegal, it is because you have improperly constructed a copyright or some other equivalent.
Posting of the song is infringement of a copyright, not a law, which is very different in several important ways.
The prevalence of the terms illegal, theft, stealing, etc. in regards to copyright is merely a disingenuous attempt to characterize what is essentially a civil dispute over contractual violations in a legal agreement constructed through copyright law.
Since it requires too much work, and money, to take actual responsibility of your legal rights, there has been a movement to appropriate authority that was usually reserved for criminal acts and actual crime and abrogate any legal entitlements the consumer thought they (quite reasonably) had.
In addition to the propaganda campaign that includes the redefining and perversion of the words theft, steal, illegal, copyright, fair use, etc. Big Content has actively engaged in activities that are unlawful, unethical, and an effective bypass and nullification of the Judicial system. After all, participating in the Judicial system costs real money. Same exact principle behind deeds of trust for real estate, which is excusing yourself from any meaningful participation in the Judicial system and eliminating any chance of the other party seeking remediation through law.
While the emergence of digital technologies and communications, that were once the realm of Sci-Fi, has utterly destroyed the barrier to entry for copyright infringement, that does not justify the serious harm against society.
The mere fact that a large corporation can act as judge, jury, and executioner against 3rd parties with no legal or contractual basis of any kind, without consequence, and without regulation, is evidence that the system is broken.
So with respect, and I do not apologize for being pedantic, it is not illegal. It is infringing.
Any case of infringement, especially these ones, are within the jurisdiction of the courts and must involve due process.
Due process is the bane of Big Content. The reason should be obvious. If they had to actually explain and justify their actions... they would lose. They can't explain why if a customer paid them money they should not be able to enjoy the work in any form they want and back it up. They can't explain why using portions of the copyrighted work for educational and journalistic purposes should be barred, or how it even harms them.
They don't want to explain or justify anything. Just control it without opposition at any cost. Society be damned. After all, they need to afford those hookers, blow, and expensive toys some how.
We don't even bother supporting IE6 for developed web sites.
However, I also have to support IE6 on some servers *only* because some vendors (lock-in) have web portals that only run on it.
Totally ridiculous, but going away far too slowly. If MS makes the whole world go "cold turkey" on this, without consent, without knowledge, all that will happen is that a bunch of IT departments will get cracked pirated versions of the OS instantly to get IE6 back and working again.
Even worse, it will result in many systems not getting updates since they are now pirated.
MS started this whole situation with a horrible, abhorrent, and inexcusable piece of shit, that is IE6. Most of the companies that are still forced to use it do so out of budget constraints.
There is going to be a number of businesses, a lot of them small businesses, that will be unable to adapt. That is hardly fair in these economic times.
I want IE6 to die just as much as anybody. Just not at the expense of businesses that will sincerely struggle to adapt, if they can adapt at all.
I think anyone here would agree that hacking and taking control of the drone has far more serious implications than simply disrupting it to push it into a fail-safe mode.
Agreed. There are still serious implications for disrupting into safe mode. I would say that still qualifies as hacking the drone. This will require changes to the fail safes at a minimum.
As far as reverse engineering is concerned, that will be quite difficult. Iranian scientists are not stupid. People putting together the propaganda are stupid and akin to PHB's, but Iranian scientists are no slouches.
While it will be some time before anything is really gained, this is going to be valuable to Iran in terms of military R&D. Returning it? Not going to happen.
There have been people that called 911 because McDonald's was out of McRibs.
I can see a lot of Farmville users calling up the service because of some natural disaster that happened on their farm, or some trophy went missing......
Slashdot Mirror
Your opinion is popular but fundamentally wrong. Technology moves on by the time all the navel-gazers (incl. you and me here) finished these 'sports bar' like discussions, where everyone is an expert of a sport they might not have ever played.
Typical IT complaint :)
My opinion is fundamentally correct. People are just missing the point.
Raising questions about how well a system will work and what problems need to be addressed, is not "nay-saying" or pessimism, but reality.
I think we can do better than single out high occupancy lanes for initial use. There are a billion creative ideas for the use of autonomous driving that may be early adopter areas. Can you make a list?
I could make a HUGE list. It's all irrelevant though till the fundamental problem is solved.
What matters is not whether there will be cases where a machine is inferior to a human, or whether there will be a machine-caused accident or not. The question is whether the loss attributed to machines is significantly lower (besides the existence of other benefits) or not. If this is the case, there is a huge economic imperative to use the technology, making the transition inevitable (it's not a naysayer's slashdot post that will halt progress).
Self-parking cars lead to automated valet errands. Volvo's traffic monitoring will lead to highway autopilot. Etc. etc. Maybe the first autonomous car that you buy will not be advertised as such. Maybe it'll be advertised as a car that can safely stop with you (whatever traffic situation you happen to be in) if you get a heart attack, while it just informs you of stuff in normal operation. It's an inevitable march, and by the time those who say "the question is not technology, but society's acceptance" have the chance of analysing the heck out of the subject, all of us will essentially sit in self-driving cars. By the time we reached conclusion on urban impact, climate change etc., as a method of transport, cars have pushed aside horses and their loyal fans.
This is the problem, and why my opinion is fundamentally correct, and also why we are discussing Google's cars in an article dedicated to autopilot software on planes.
Pilots are highly trained people. There is a wealth of knowledge and math that is required to be a pilot. If it was so easy to get a pilot's license (never mind the requirements for jumbo jets) then more people would have them. They don't.
The transition between auto-pilot and pilot is very forgiving compared to the transition between auto-driver and driver.
Does a pilot have another jumbo jet 3 feet in front of it, or 3 feet to the side? Let's look at it in terms of reaction time. Does a pilot ever have to react within a couple of seconds to objects around him? In a scenario that does not involve dirty underwear and an investigation by the FAA?
No.
Drivers have to react all the time to objects that are mere seconds or less from impacting them depending on their decisions. People take driving for granted without realizing just how dangerous it really is. Not surprising since the number of people that have a decent grasp on physics and math is pretty low in the US.
That is the fundamental problem that needs to be addressed and why my opinion and observation is fundamentally correct.
In a mixed system of auto-drivers and drivers, the auto-drivers will, on average, do as well as the drivers in terms of not hitting something else. They will not have any increased efficiency in traffic since they will have the same problem. Human drivers lack a good ability to cooperate with another in a highly coordinated fashion due to the inherent selfishness of the species it seems, as well as the problem of communicating and processing that much data with other humans.
Not impossible though. I have witnessed something seemingly supernatural in China where a city predominated by
It's not about choosing one or the other, but hybrid systems operating at the same time.
If you are going to compare quality, the human will win every time. We can give anecdotal evidence about how bad drivers are, but statistics show that driving is not so dangerous that we need to consider stopping it altogether. Really think about it for a second. During your average day, how many really bad drivers did you personally interact with that created a dangerous situation resulting in an accident? Pretty low huh? I would expect so, otherwise insurance would cost thousands and thousands per month, instead of per year.
Humans are not the inferior solution overall right now. Not by far.
It is also not because Google is not perfect either. Specifically, it is because of the time required, and the complexity of shifting control from Google to the driver. Once such a system becomes normal to a driver, their attention is not going to be on the road, but on their interaction with other devices. You cannot reasonably expect a person to be in complete awareness, hands at 10-2, ready in a split second to take control. You would get too bored without immediate feedback, your mind would drift. This would be completely normal too.
This is not to say that the system itself might not be useful, but it would have to be under very controlled conditions excluding human drivers altogether. It could work, provided the shifting of control was at a controlled rate in relatively controlled conditions. Give the human being time to adapt and obtain situational awareness.
As cool as this sounds, it is just not ready to fully replace a human, unless it could perform at a human level or better. The dream of a car that can drive itself completely under all conditions is still some ways away.
The idea of changing carpool lanes over to high efficiency lanes where human control is not allowed seems like a more pragmatic approach that decreases the complexity and uncertainty that the Google system has to deal with. It has very high value as well since it can optimize traffic patterns far better than a human simply because it can cooperate with a much larger number of cars over greater distances. A human could never hope to do that with our inherent limitations.
That system could realize some serious fuel savings and increase productivity by essentially mimicking an airplane in auto pilot mode. The human is really just there to get the system to the point where it can safely transition in and out of a computer controlled lane. That will be extremely advantageous to overall traffic.
I don't know what "battle" you are referring to.
The same battle is being replayed with smart phones and BYOD. And the IT High Priests will lose again.
There is your first problem. Calling IT "High Priests". You make them the enemy and fight every single thing like a complete idiot, "just because", and you are making things worse. IT is there to enable the other employees to get their work done, but they are also there to protect to the company.
Strike a BALANCE between APPROPRIATE security and usability, or your IT department will be outsourced.
That is not balance and BYOD is not appropriate. The threat of outsourcing creates duress, which automatically creates the absence of balance.
It is impossible to have even an adequate level of security with BYOD. It does not even make any sense in Enterprise cases anyways.
You can have a defeatist attitude, but stopping BYOD is so easy you don't even have to have the confrontational battle you so desperately seek. The idea of BYOD to replace corporate equipment is just retarded. It will be a fad, and then there will be the absolute fucking horror stories with price tags attached to steep, that even the most pointiest of the pointy haired bosses will think twice before pushing it.
BYOD, that accompanies corporate equipment is entirely possible in the ways that I outlined. Keep it on separate networks and keep it from interacting with corporate hardware.
Path Of Least Resistance.
Why have the employees fight you? The idea is to be the people they come to for answers. The people that can tell them how to solve problems, how to be secure, etc. How to best accomplish something with the least amount of effort.
I get called over sometimes for something as simple as help with an Excel spreadsheet formula and advice on a home system. I don't really mind if I have the time.
By building such strong relationships built on trust and mutual respect, the employees want to cooperate. They don't see you as the dickhead trying to prevent them from hitting a website up during lunch, but the guy that gives them a safe alternative and is willing to stand up to the execs to allow their personal phones to connect to Facebook without issue.
The employees that just don't get it, I come down with the wrath of the gods on them and make their little lives so fucking miserable that when I show them the path of least resistance they run towards it and never screw with me again.
Truth be told, I have only had to make an example a couple of times and the word gets out even to the new people about the right way to do things.
Only in your wildest IT Nerd dreams could you punish a user severely just because they found a way to check their GMail account from "your" network.
I already have. 1st time was a warning. 2nd time involved Hamachi installed on a corporate machine to try and get around the corporate firewall and controlling a home PC. 3 days suspended without pay and a complete rebuild of the workstation from the ground up.
Try having the VP of Sales fired for that.
Punish severely does not mean fired. If it comes to a VP, I just talk to the VP and explain what the legal liabilities are and how much it costs when they screw up. You must have missed the part about providing a path of least resistance. If I give the VP a way to conduct personal actions that don't put the company at risk, a VP is generally smart enough to want to do it.
Even if he does cause a data breach, he'll just make sure you get blamed for that because he is far more skilled in organizational politics then you could ever be.
That won't make one bit of difference when the logs show otherwise. A 3rd party audit from a security firm will only validate what I have said anyways. Sure the veep might not get fired, but behind closed doors, there will be hell to pay if he really exposed the company to that level of liability, and more hell to pay it it tarnished the reputation of the company and clients/customers had to be notified. Even worse in a regulated industry.
Now if you are talking about the levels of corruption to the point where all the execs cover up each others fuck ups and lie to regulators.... well then you would be pretty stupid to stay at that company if you had any knowledge of what was going on. I quit a company that I thought *might* be doing questionable things and you can bet your ass I took evidence with me that I was in compliance with all regulations and dotted every "i" and crossed every "t".
It's bad idea for a specific reason.
There are two "brains" that can operate the car. Google can make a pretty decent brain, but it is not going to come remotely close (in any way) to the human brain in terms of its ability to perceive the environment (sensors), make sense of it (pattern recognition), and put it all into context (experience, extrapolation).
Google will excel in reaction times and advanced planning. Through Google it will be possible to mitigate traffic by solving a very human problem, which is cooperation towards a common goal. Google could react faster, and with less overcompensation, to a car drifting into its lane.
Where Google will fall far short is recognizing the road rage in the driver next to it (beating his hands on the steering wheel and screaming), the lack of concentration (woman putting her lipstick on), etc. Putting those things in context and assigning risk to drivers next to you is not something Google will be able to do from its sensors. However, even the average driver is getting cues in so many ways about what is really going on around them.
The reason why it is a bad idea, is that while Google is operating, the human brain is off. It's not instant-on either. Driving is a constant level of concentration, even when it seems like you are doing it "subconsciously". From start to finish, the average driver is pretty aware of their surroundings and processing an impressive amount of data. A human brain will beat Google every time on those terms.
When Google fails, or "judges" the environment poorly, how quickly can the human brain come back online, evaluate the current environment, take control, and make the required adjustments?
Until the Google brain is able to fully replace a human brain, it is not a good idea to involve the two in a hybrid system. The lag between the two systems taking control from one another is just too great.
Self-parking is fine, and limited operations involving high efficiency traffic lanes where human control is not permitted will be fine. As long as the transition into those operations is in a time frame a human can deal with.
Example being, the human brain pulls the car along the high efficiency traffic lane, "tags" the Google brain in to insert itself into the traffic. The Google brain then notifies the driver and validates proper control and awareness before exiting the traffic and turning control over to the human driver. Failure means Google pulls the car to the left in the emergency lane and brings the car to a full stop.
Any other kind of operations just seems fundamentally unwise to me because of the hybrid nature and inherent limitations of Google's AI, advanced as it may be for now.
My threshold for letting a computer operate a car no differently than a human, is the computer can meet or exceed the human's ability in every respect. That is not true right now, and will not be true for decades.
You may trust a Google car more than the average driver, but that is only really true if the Google car also has no driver.
Most people are lazy and don't feel they have the need to encrypt their communications. If they are willing to post the shit they do on Facebook, they are already a lost cause from a privacy/anonymity viewpoint.
Setting up email to send encrypted payloads is not easy for most people, and the people that know how, quickly lose interest after spending an hour to set up one person.
Now, all of my emails *are* encrypted, and not just in transit. I use a special IMAP connector for Outlook that encrypts all traffic with SSL to the mail server. The web portal for my email server is encrypted with SSL as well. Where *possible* my mail server will negotiate a secure connection to a remote server, but that is pretty damn rare. On my personal computer the message store is located on a TrueCrypt drive, so if my computer is lost or stolen, I am not worried about the message store, which is temporary anyways since the email is stored on the server.
All of it is pointless if the other party is not doing the same exact thing, which is most of the time. So I never send anything in the clear that I don't want analyzed, categorized, and used by private corporations and government.
For correspondence that needs to remain secure I usually set up an email account on the same server. That way everything is encrypted down to the message store and emails sent between domains hosted on the same mail server are just internally routed.
This is the same reason why truly secure phone calls are next to impossible in systems that must be able to perform call setups to any other phone. Too many intermediary points that cannot handle it. ZRTP, while interesting, is a long way from implementation, and will never address insecure endpoints like landlines and cell phones.
It's the other end that is problem, just as you say, but it is also the points in between. As long as there are free services that won't waste the CPU cycles to negotiate encryption between mail servers, it does not make that much sense.
Bottom line, I am secure where I need to be, not through encryption specifically, but choosing what I say, when I say it, and what communications medium I choose.
Now you are talking about data security.
Employees are advised that access to personal email on corporate equipment is expressly prohibited and punishable all the way up to dismissal. Follow through on it. Corporate networks have active firewalls to prevent access to most personal email portals and log the crap out of everything. Follow up on the logs. Identify employees that have done so, and punish them severely . Make an example.
I have gone so far as to have a white list only intercepting proxy between the corporate machines and the Internet that prevents most of what you are concerned about.
Depending on how far you want to take it, there are many security concepts like data diodes, and advanced security platforms that you can implement with respect to data.
Like I said in another post.. path of least resistance. You can go full TOP SECRET security level practices, or just have an intercepting proxy with logging. Employees from workstations should never ever have access to the full database. Just systems that are secure themselves performing API calls to back-end database servers that do not have any direct access to corporate/branch office networks.
In the end, of course there is some form of connection. Balance between security and usability.....
Not really. It depends on your point of view and where you see yourself in the balance between security and usability.
Remember, we are talking about corporations here. Not just small businesses here either, but large ones implied by the term "financial institutions".
Medium sized businesses to Enterprise businesses have serious security issues to address. Fail to address them, or to even understand them, is what leads to security "incidents" that compromise your customers, impact your current operations, tarnish your reputation, and are costly to fix.
"An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure".
You may say I am being overboard here, but that really does depend on the environment and situation. With financial data I would never even allow branch offices or executives direct access to any data at all. If they want something with credit card numbers or soc#, I would give them the bin/last4 of the credit card and last4 of the social.
I guess what it really comes down to is you are serious about the security of your system. You seem to have an impression that I am out of balance and a tyrant running IT whipping the employees.
Not so. If you read my post, I actively work with the employees to reach an understanding on what is dangerous and can hurt us. Locking down the network, gluing USB ports shut, and participating in a cold war with employees is fruitless. It just makes them resent you, and executives can override you anyways.
Give them options that make sense that still allow them to have a good experience. Public network access that does not represent a security risk is a good start. It not only allows employees a place to safely interact with the rest of the Internet, but guests of the company as well.
I have advised executives countless times to ignore personal email, Facebooking, etc. As long as work is getting done and you don't see them doing it more than the amount of their break times, leave it alone. If the employee can responsibly balance their time while responding to txt's or twits, or whatever, while accomplishing their tasks, deliverables, etc. let them have that leeway.
How are so lenient policies so far out there? If anything it is pragmatic with respect to human behavior. Offer a path of least resistance.
Then in the end they get their asses handed to them hard, and by hard, I mean reaalllly hard .
No competent IT person will ever agree to allow BYOD to propagate through the workplace. Not with access to any kind of sensitive data whatsoever that is not already passing through secured portals.
Secured websites that allow access, that they themselves are limited in what they can show, is one thing. That allows functionality not just in the workplace, but in the field. It also allows a lot more freedom in what kind of devices can be used. Tablets, phones, computers, etc. Freedom in operating systems is great too. If the employee can get everything done in a web browser, then you don't need the expensive Windows fat clients.
Bring your own personal computer in to work? Only the executives would think of something so "full-retard" like that.
I have always locked corporate down harder than East Germany. Nobody even knows the wireless passwords to access the corporate network, and executives who demand business laptops, get them configured by IT. Some places even get the Ethernet locked down further so that unauthorized devices cannot connect. They don't know the passwords either. No stupid Facebook, Twitter, etc. from within the corporate network.
To make it easier, I just provide a public wireless network with a simple password for all the employees to use. Separate IP address space, and not even remotely connected to the corporate network and VPNs. If they want Facebook, Twitter, and all the Social Media crap plus media streaming of YouTube, Pandora, etc. they can do it on another network that won't impact corporate operations. I make it a clear policy that they can use the public network with their own devices in any way they want because it is safer. The only thing they are not allowed to do is directly transfer or connect their devices to corporate hardware. You make it reasonable like that, and the vast majority of employees are happy and not trying to bypass your corporate security to get to Facebook while on break.
Security and Usability is a balancing act.
If the company execs want to shove Usability down IT's throat, despite common sense and valid warnings, and at the expense of security, just to gain some perceived ability to work employees harder for the bottom line ... then get your resume ready to jump ship.
You will have to jump ship. I have to be skeptical about this. Financial institutions and highly regulated companies doing this? I have to doubt this. Any security company that comes in to audit them or evaluate their security is going to have a field day killing several trees with reports to the execs about how insecure and vulnerable their network is. Would it pass PCI compliance? Doubtful.
All it takes is one really bad screwup. Lose a half million credit numbers (with full info) and then the executives might really understand the cost of letting employees bring in their tainted malware infested, porn overloaded, crap equipment from home.
I write this while downloading an ISO to fix an executives business laptop that they crapped up with malware.
It's already a never ending battle for IT to keep the corporate network and assets from being owned by hackers and malware. Handcuffing us and force marching us down a path to the 9th level of IT hell is just an oh-so-good idea. There is a really really good reason why IT has to control all hardware connected up to corporate. Any hardware we don't control is not just a point of failure, but a security vulnerability waiting to be exploited.
How many hacking groups out there are just waiting for that "big fat gold nugget" that is a laptop being connected up to a major financial institution from the inside?
No they are not.
If they contractually allow a 3rd party access to the system programmatically (API) to perform whatever actions are allowed by policy (which is wide open apparently) it not the API provider that is responsible for the actions.
UMG is actively policing the content in question, and UMG is the one performing the deletions directly via the API according to the article. This does not involve the specific knowledge, nor intent, of Google to police anything.
They are specifically allowing UMG to police their content, which means.... they are not doing it themselves. You cannot make them complicit in these actions simply because you want it to be so.
As it relates to the safe harbor status in the DMCA, Google would not be actively policing its own content, and therefore losing the status.
Whether or not Google is correct in this, ethical, or "being evil" is immaterial to the specific question at hand, which is, "Is Google actively policing its own content?".
They are not.
Gift giving for nieces is simple. When in doubt - give chocolate. Because chocolate never goes out of style. If you've ever tasted some of the more expensive specialty chocolates, you'll know what I mean. Think of the sweatiest, dirtiest, raunchiest, kinkiest sex you ever had - and multiply by two. It's that good.
3 little observations.
1) You're giving your nieces something better than the best sex you ever had? I don't know if that is just really perverted, or the best Aunt ever. All relative I guess.
2) This is Slashdot. Anything multiplied by zero is... ummmm. zero.
3) Can you post a link to those specific chocolates? 7 days till Christmas so there is still time left for ordering.
You're arguing semantics here, and I think you are wrong.
If I offer an API for my website services and you use it to delete something, did you delete it, or did I delete it?
Personally, I was completely unaware of it while it was happening and did not have any input. My API did not seek my input on your deletion request.
According to the article, Google granted UMG access via their API to do just that. That is *not* Google actively policing their content. Google has stepped back and allowed UMG to act "arbitrarily".
Google is not doing anything at the behest of UMG. They entered a contractual agreement with UMG in which UMG has the right to delete videos at their sole discretion apparently.
If you can get a contract with Google allowing you the same level of access, ostensibly via API, then you can make those decisions too.
Not arguing that Google is right to agree to it, only that they don't meet the definition of "actively policing their content" with the aforementioned implications withe the DMCA's safe harbor status. This is completely 3rd party.
You can't just pass a law saying that all cars must get 100 MPG, and then leave it to the engineers to make your law so. It would obviously lead to disaster.
This is business as usual, and not just in the US.
Dilbert, while funny, is depressingly accurate.
The vast majority of marketers, executives, etc. really do think they can just order the engineers and IT department to "make it so". When the IT department comes back and says, "You are asking us to violate the laws of physics and alter reality to create a floating Unicorn that is as "smart" as Suri, and shits out candy corn", they get branded as "Not Team Players".
Part of the reason why IT is hated so much, is that we are telling them what they can't do more often then what they can do. It's not pessimism either, which really gets under my skin, but just reality.
When IT has no clout either, they end up having to break systems to get to them to do what they were never intended to do, or do things that clearly make the system itself unstable.
Happens all the time. Rarely, do you see a system that is a harmony of perfection. The ones that come close..... have upper management made up of IT people. I kid you not, some of the most advanced platforms I have seen recently in some industries have been developed by engineers and IT people leaving companies to make new ones.
The Internet is far worse. Let's not kid ourselves here either. While I have a superficial understanding of BGP routing, and the complexities involved in DNS, secure DNS, etc. I am not an expert either. So when most of IT out there does not really understand the core workings of the Internet, you can't expect the PHB's in Congress to have any clue, and it becomes perfectly understandable that they would expect it "to just work". Corporations and engineers waive their hands and do their Matrix thing in the backrooms, and it get's done.
What is missing are the middle men. The people that can explain to the Congress Critters in terms they can understand, "It's bad. Can't be done like that, Mkay".
Where are they experts here? What really surprises me is that the telecoms are not screaming their heads off through their purchased channels at their paid for politicians that it's a bad idea.
Must be because Big Content is paying more right now for influence than the telecoms......
I actually saw something like a documentary of how fast food commercials get made.
There was no food in the hamburger, or the fries. I swear, I thought they said the mayo dripping off the sides was white shower caulk. The cheddar cheese was shiny plastic, the buns were foam, etc.
That hamburger was about as edible as a Mr. Potato Head. Which really is not accurate now that I think of it, because I seem to remember eating one in kindergarten.
All the display case samples, similar to the ones you see on the walls in some places, is what they were photographing.
You can't photoshop an actual hamburger to look like that.
LOL.
No... It is not common.
cosmetic
(kz-mtk)
n.
1. A preparation, such as powder or a skin cream, designed to beautify the body by direct application.
2. Something superficial that is used to cover a deficiency or defect.
adj.
1. Serving to beautify the body, especially the face and hair.
2. Serving to modify or improve the appearance of a physical feature, defect, or irregularity: cosmetic surgery.
3.
a. Decorative rather than functional: cosmetic fenders on cars.
b. Lacking depth or significance; superficial: made a few cosmetic changes when she took over the company.
Which man, that is attracted to women, uses powders or skin creams regularly? I don't know any either.
Superficial stuff to cover a deficiency or defect? I don't think Just For Men qualifies, but maybe tangentially at best.
Serving to beautify the body, especially face and hair. No on that as well. Old Spice does not count as a cosmetic. All the scented shampoos and body washes get purchased because of all the commercials that imply it creates a "pussy gravity well" in which pussy is drawn towards you inexorably, specifically towards your penis. It has nothing to do with the fact it makes your hair look good.
Men don't use cosmetics.
Google is not actively policing its own content, UMG is. I am sure as part of the licensing agreement Google is absolved of any liability as it has become UMG's responsibility to police the content.
I would not be surprised if Google has quietly done this with all "big" (read enough money to sue them) content distributors so that they don't have to do anything.
ContentID was a massive failure. It never actually worked right and the copyright owners were swamped with "spam" notifications that turned out to be nothing, or worse, they took down everything. The resultant complaints, from people like me, that showed the ContentID system was fundamentally flawed and taking down videos without cause gave Google a difficult problem to solve. In my own case, the videos were only flagged and no action was taken. That was from a single copyright owner though, that probably made the decision to not do anything. UMG I bet would have acted differently.
Your concerns are mitigated through whatever contractual agreements that Google has with UMG.
Also the cost of potential data leaks due to unpatched/unsupported/unsafe browsers totally shadows the cost of upgrading a shitty intranet website.
That's completely irrelevant if the company is floundering and the costs are so high, that they might as well be infinite.
So if people have "budget constraints" about this, they don't understand the concept of security and how it can hurt their business.
No.. It's worse than that. Most of them do, they just keep deciding to *not* fire Bob so that his salary can pay for the team of developers to spend weeks upgrading them to the latest and greatest MS technologies.
So far you have spoken about internal websites. What about external websites?
Vendor-lock-in is not pretty. When you have one or more 3rd party companies providing a service that you cannot operate without, you have no choice but to use IE6. It is simplistic to take a hard line approach and just get rid of them, if that is even possible.
Which is why, there are some Windows Server 2003 installations that actually have IE6 running on them specifically so remote desktop sessions can access these 3rd party vendors.
When there is no money for additional development, and the money to retrain staff and purchase different platforms do not exist, and 3rd party vendors to replace those still stuck on IE6, you have real problems.
As far as forewarning, the writing has been on the wall for YEARS. Like I said, no money is the bigger issue. Considering how hard the economies of the world right now are being hit, performing actions that can push small businesses under will only add to our problems.
If MS really wanted to solve the problem they could identify those businesses in trouble, and offer help in transitioning the platforms. In truth, switching all those older platforms out with professional help from MS might cost them 20-30 million dollars, or more. The PR would be invaluable, and quite frankly, MS should try giving something back when they have already taken so much. You might be thinking why should MS shoulder any responsibility? They wrote they farking thing in the first place, and unlike struggling small business, MS has the money and ability to do it.
But your right. Let's just switch it off and those who can survive, will survive. If Bob loses his job because the company cannot adapt, that's life and Bob should have had a plan. Meanwhile, his wife Lucine, with breast cancer, can just figure out how to pay for their medications and treatment without medical benefits paid for by the company.
Fuck em.
Two Words: Animal Farm.
Laws apply to the Plebs. Laws do not apply to those in power. Those in power make the laws.
Eventually, the Plebs get fed up with the bullshit and kill those in power. Some of the Plebs get used to the benefits and trappings of power. They cease to be Plebs.
Rinse. Repeat.
Posting a full song online is not illegal. Illegal specifically means against the law. They are trying to change and pervert the law all the time, so who really knows when even thinking about a song without authorization is actually against a law, but today posting a song is not illegal.
Copyright law structures the copyright and enumerates and defines the rights (legal entitlements). If you have violated copyright law, which meets the definition of illegal, it is because you have improperly constructed a copyright or some other equivalent.
Posting of the song is infringement of a copyright, not a law, which is very different in several important ways.
The prevalence of the terms illegal, theft, stealing, etc. in regards to copyright is merely a disingenuous attempt to characterize what is essentially a civil dispute over contractual violations in a legal agreement constructed through copyright law.
Since it requires too much work, and money, to take actual responsibility of your legal rights, there has been a movement to appropriate authority that was usually reserved for criminal acts and actual crime and abrogate any legal entitlements the consumer thought they (quite reasonably) had.
In addition to the propaganda campaign that includes the redefining and perversion of the words theft, steal, illegal, copyright, fair use, etc. Big Content has actively engaged in activities that are unlawful, unethical, and an effective bypass and nullification of the Judicial system. After all, participating in the Judicial system costs real money. Same exact principle behind deeds of trust for real estate, which is excusing yourself from any meaningful participation in the Judicial system and eliminating any chance of the other party seeking remediation through law.
While the emergence of digital technologies and communications, that were once the realm of Sci-Fi, has utterly destroyed the barrier to entry for copyright infringement, that does not justify the serious harm against society.
The mere fact that a large corporation can act as judge, jury, and executioner against 3rd parties with no legal or contractual basis of any kind, without consequence, and without regulation, is evidence that the system is broken.
So with respect, and I do not apologize for being pedantic, it is not illegal. It is infringing.
Any case of infringement, especially these ones, are within the jurisdiction of the courts and must involve due process.
Due process is the bane of Big Content. The reason should be obvious. If they had to actually explain and justify their actions... they would lose. They can't explain why if a customer paid them money they should not be able to enjoy the work in any form they want and back it up. They can't explain why using portions of the copyrighted work for educational and journalistic purposes should be barred, or how it even harms them.
They don't want to explain or justify anything. Just control it without opposition at any cost. Society be damned. After all, they need to afford those hookers, blow, and expensive toys some how.
We don't even bother supporting IE6 for developed web sites.
However, I also have to support IE6 on some servers *only* because some vendors (lock-in) have web portals that only run on it.
Totally ridiculous, but going away far too slowly. If MS makes the whole world go "cold turkey" on this, without consent, without knowledge, all that will happen is that a bunch of IT departments will get cracked pirated versions of the OS instantly to get IE6 back and working again.
Even worse, it will result in many systems not getting updates since they are now pirated.
MS started this whole situation with a horrible, abhorrent, and inexcusable piece of shit, that is IE6. Most of the companies that are still forced to use it do so out of budget constraints.
There is going to be a number of businesses, a lot of them small businesses, that will be unable to adapt. That is hardly fair in these economic times.
I want IE6 to die just as much as anybody. Just not at the expense of businesses that will sincerely struggle to adapt, if they can adapt at all.
even if it was a good movie instead of a smurf handjob fest
So THAT'S why they are always fucking singing!! I knew it had to be something.
I'm pretty sure that corporations and governments cannot violate the laws of physics.
You fool!
Black Mesa, Aperture Science, and UAC mean nothing to you?
I think anyone here would agree that hacking and taking control of the drone has far more serious implications than simply disrupting it to push it into a fail-safe mode.
Agreed. There are still serious implications for disrupting into safe mode. I would say that still qualifies as hacking the drone. This will require changes to the fail safes at a minimum.
As far as reverse engineering is concerned, that will be quite difficult. Iranian scientists are not stupid. People putting together the propaganda are stupid and akin to PHB's, but Iranian scientists are no slouches.
While it will be some time before anything is really gained, this is going to be valuable to Iran in terms of military R&D. Returning it? Not going to happen.
Just because it's internet doesn't mean you can do whatever you want and there are no consequences.
Yeah. That only happens in Las Vegas.
Trolling may be the least of their problems.
There have been people that called 911 because McDonald's was out of McRibs.
I can see a lot of Farmville users calling up the service because of some natural disaster that happened on their farm, or some trophy went missing......