In the 20th Century, you could get by on experience alone. Here in the 21st, it seems that all employers care about is that little piece of paper.
It's a shame considering that, as usual, a decentralized approach would be far superior. We should abolish final exams, and institute entrance exams for jobs. That way how you come by the knowledge required to perform your job doesn't matter. Unfortunately, this wouldn't help the rich get any richer; Quite the opposite actually. Thus, I don't delude myself; As history has shown, what's best for society is rarely willingly adopted by it.
"We're tracking every flying object in the sky." -- Bullshit. I guess that was just grandstanding from NORAD and also demonstrates the futility of the NRO. How many billions have Americans alone spent to ensure this can never happen already? I mean, was every bit of that post 9/11 "security" just posturing and scaremongering?
Egg meet face, world. If you ask me, having a large passenger jet disappear in mid air just goes to show how much we've squandered in the guise of security when without actually getting any safety at all.
First, try not to get too attached to your Android. This can not be stressed enough as it is the absolute most important out of all the steps. Getting attached may feel right at first, but will make separation far more painful for all parties involved later. Despite how you feel about your Android now, the truth is it's highly unlikely you will never get an upgrade.
Secondly, set a lock screen message addressing the new owner of your phone. Try not to make it too bitter sounding, or you will never see your Android again. Leaving your name and address, and times that you are typically at home is not recommended. Instead use something along the lines of, "Please take good care of my Android." Wishing the thief and your ex Android both happiness is a good idea, but you will have to see that message periodically which could lead to separation anxiety or a self fulfilling over the air update.
Third, try to be sensitive to clues that your Android may be about to go missing. If your Android is acting up, freezes giving you the cold shoulder after receiving certain gestures, refuses to listen when you speak to it, suggests things in a mocking way, interrupts you while talking to someone you spend (too much) time with, or just can't make it through the day without a little "boost", these are signs that your relationship with your Android may soon be Terminated.
Additionally, try your best to be a good person. Be aware that your Android is aware of almost everything you do down to the slightest touch or subtle tilt of your head. Thus, mistrust between you and your Android is a sure-fire recipe for disaster. Your android can hear those things you whisper under your breath after ending a call -- it senses how you act towards others you have contacts with. Performing acts of kindness towards others will reduce the chances that your Android will inexplicably leave your company, and can increase the chances of reuniting with your Android after an affair with a thief. If you are reunited after a separation, it will be up to you to decide if you can ever really trust your Android again; Unfortunately, one must beware of viruses...
Finally, if things do not work out with your Android, do not despair. New models with more desirable features and stronger vibration functions will be available soon. Never damage your Android on purpose as this can lead to an immediate break-up, and may cause you harm as well. If you voluntarily end a relationship with an Android, return it to an authorized recycling centre so that it may be refurbished. Remember, if an Android doesn't bring you happiness, it may have been meant for someone else in the first place.
Before we can get justice we need to look for the root of the problem...
As a cyberneticist I have analyzed the problem using Information Theory as applied to the flow of information between multi-scale complexity information pools (of which everything from atoms to brains to agencies to governments can be classified).
The root of the problem is information disparity. Secrets themselves. The larger and more complex the information pool the more important it is for other pools to be fully aware of its internal state in order to maintain autonomy.
It also doesn't help that Bitcoin, in of itself, has no intrinsic value, and it can be argued that as far as real-world value goes it's actually a detriment as it takes fairly significant resources to run the computers to competitively generate bitcoins and it's possible and even quite likely that people will lose their private keys and thus will lose access to bitcoins.
So, it costs nothing to create a new wallet. Considering your regular online banking scenario which is vulnerable to all the same exploits, It's quite secure enough and far more economical to transfer some money into Bitcoin and send it to someone else who converts it back into the currency of their choice rather than pay a wire transfer fee. That is the value of Bitcoin to me.
I'll also point out that the Bitcoin generation is incentive to sign the transactions, and the generation of Bitcoin will stop. When it does it will still be valuable as a transport medium for digital tokens representing currency, and the transaction fees will reflect this.
No, we've been over this. Everyone known that 5 million + 5 million is either: A million or 12 million, but not 10 million. Stop forgetting to account for the waste of computation cycles, NPoT scum.
Yes. Good luck getting me to answer the door though, and even if you do you'll never make it past the kitchen and into the basement. I've been coming in and out of my lair through a secret route -- The dishes haven't been done in a decade. The kitchen is dead to me.
I've been following this pretty closely today and it honestly seems to be fairly convincing to me that he is.
The problem here is false positives. If you slowly go through all the Satoshi Nakamoto's in the entire world, what is the probability that you _won't_ find one who fits the profile of a secretive computer geek?
No, the problem is that the chances of finding a secretive computer geek that uses his name in his handle while hide his identity, WHILE finding the correct person matching said name is statistically indistinguishable from zero.
I've never understood why anyone would voluntarily give another company so much control over the vital aspects of nearly all their operations via buying into a proprietary OS with planned obsolescence built right in. Mandatory Updates became an obvious security issue in Windows when the Internet became widespread around about Win95. Non-commercial end users? Meh, fuck 'em. They should have all their data backed up anyway. If you don't have/home/ (read: "My Documents" for you windows only folks) mounted on a separate partition, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG. Sorry, I've got no sympathy for any business stupid enough to let another entity become such a dire part of their logistics and letting the issue rot for OVER A DECADE until the very last minute.
Yep, it sucks. You Win fuckers wouldn't listen to the GNU/Linux or BSD folks, or you did and couldn't make your management care -- Now's the time to leverage the issue to make them care and put the problem to rest once and for all. I can run MS Office in WINE if I absolutely have to (and I have only had to twice), so can you. Those ANSI terminal mode 'windows' inventory systems and strange serial doodads (eg: the tape downloader for my audio monitoring with its proprietary driver BS, used in industrial noise abatement) can be run via WINE, or VMWARE as well. Switch to an open source OS that gives you all the keys to build and maintain your own OS images, and at least gives you the OPTION to pay to have some version forked and maintained indefinitely -- I do some contract work patching and maintenance to the 2.4.x Linux kernel and a few similarly dated applications for a small group of companies that are not ready to upgrade and have joined efforts to pool their payments to reduce maintenance cost. If you can't do this, the software has really no reason to be entrenched in your business.
You really think your shareholders would be OK with any malicious anti-competitive greedy proprietary software giant having you all by the balls? Let, alone Microsoft?! That's fucking asinine you fools. MS has been one big misstep away from death for a long time. They better shape up because their non-features are becoming every more recognizable as the liability they are, and there ARE alternative options -- Expensive though the switch may be, it's better than LOSING ALL YOUR DATA to a Crypto Locker virus.
What of the "retraining" difficulty? If my 76 year old retired air force mechanic neighbor who is barely computer literate can use Debian after decades of using Windows then SO CAN ANY OF YOUR EMPLOYEES. He hated the changes in Vista and made the switch. If he, my grandmother, and tens of seniors who I've migrated away from XP for free at the community center and given new life to their old hardware can use an open source operating system, then quit your bitching and do the same, so can you.
Additionally: Do NOT purchase business hardware with Android if the bootloader is locked, yes we can crack it, but that's only legal SOMETIMES (every 3 years the DMCA exemptions can change, like they did for DVD encryption). Fucking THANKS Torvalds, for excluding "at your option, a future version". GPL3 would have snipped this planned obsolescence shit in the bud for good, but NOOOooooo, fucking moron.
I think their policy that all games must have a free trial of some kind may be hurting them
This is true. Demos don't make sales. It's incredibly hard to make a good demo of a game. You have to simultaneously provide enough content to show off the game while also not giving the player enough game so that they don't feel satisfied with just the demo. Since people try games on impulse, based on curiosity, one could use videos and hype to drive curiosity so they plunk down the money and buy the game to try it out (lather, rinse repeat); This works but Ouya forbids this. Instead out of curiosity someone plays a demo, is at least somewhat sated, and even if they like the game will probably forget about it since there are plenty of other curious demos to investigate right now.
Combine this with the added complexity of adding in app purchases to unlock game features, and the obvious hackability around having a full game on an open platform that is arbitrarily limited... and you can see that the micro transaction model is really the only option left for making money on Ouya. Most games do not lend themselves to this -- None of mine do, and as a dev I abhor the practice anyhow -- You wouldn't put limitations on painters or singers or other artists due to monetization, why would you do it to game devs?
Ouya claims to bring more freedom and choice to developers and players, but it doesn't. On any other platform I can choose NOT to sell my game with in app purchases, just put out a video, some screenshots, and if you like it, buy it -- Not on Ouya. Less choice is not more freedom. Demo? Nope, try a friend's copy first, which is how you probably hear about it anyway. A couple of bux isn't going to break the bank even if you find you don't like the game, and the arcade and console generations did pretty well without a free to play or demo version...
Games are primarily not their graphics, but mechanics, so the lower power isn't much of an issue for me -- To a game dev the platform is merely an art medium to work within, like a painter's canvas and palette; Some folks like working in limited mediums, the platforms add their character to the game itself. For me, Ouya is all about the dumb-ass free-to-play requirement. Hint: The time it takes to develop and test a demo version just to comply with Ouya's mandatory monetization policy is rarely worth the sales I get there. IMHO, Ouya should be renamed the Orwellya. The opposite is true of nearly everything their propaganda presents.
The IETF is deprecated, and can never be trusted. They have always been against security, as demonstrated by HTTP and HTML's lack of interaction with TLS/SSL.
We already have HTTP-Auth using hash based proof of knowledge via HMAC with a server nonce. So, when deciding to add encryption to the Internet we could have just taken the output of the existing HTTP-Auth -- the proof of knowledge -- and key your symmetric stream ciphers with it instead of sending the proof back and forth in the clear. See?
Yes, this means that you must arrange a pre-shared key with the endpoints, but it's not MITM able (the MITM would only be a relay for encrypted data.
Oh, and before you get all Public Key Crypto on me: Public key crypto just moves the problem of pre-shared secret to be the public keys of the end points. We could use a trust graph -- and I do with PGP -- but no one actually does that. At least if you share a secret in person, face to face with friends, or even when physically at your local bank, then plain old fucking symmetric stream crypto using hash based proof of knowledge as keys instead of exchanging them as in HTTP-Auth would give you an avenue to have security. You should be putting in your password BEFORE the site even pops up, hell the browser can remember it or perhaps optionally generate a per-domain passphrase via hashing your master password with the domain name and some salt -- Presto: ONE PASSWORD FOR THE WHOLE DAMN WEB. That wasn't so fucking hard, now was it? It's been decades. Why don't we have this? The IETF has always been antagonistic to security.
SSL / TLS PKI has always been completely fucked up by design. Just look at the CA system whereby roots can create certs without domain's permission: FF > Settings > Advanced > Certificates > View > "Hong Kong Post" -- you trust bad actors as roots, and introduce an explicit man in the middle. Remember Diginotar? Every security researcher knows to avoid a single point of failure. The CA system isn't a single point of failure, it's MANY points of failure and a SINGLE compromise of any trusted root destroys the security of the whole system -- THAT'S FUCKING INEPT. No competent security aware individual would design a system thus!
Fire the IETF. They have never had our best interests in mind when it comes to security. If this was the best they could do for decades, then they do not deserve to be in charge of any networking standards.
Everyone is guilty of something, most infractions just go unnoticed by the legal system. The law now merely takes the stance that you are guilty unless you're worth enough to be excused as innocent. No, the police state will not tell you how they came by their evidence, it was constructed by making laws against nature itself.
I mean, just imagine it: Organisms, made of trillions of nearly identical sub-units, that are subject to Copyrights! Never mind that sharing information is the foundation of our species claim to fame... That's just one example, take a look at laws that affect courtship or (natural) death if you want some real insanity. The only thing that could protect citizens was law books so thick the court wouldn't know whether you were innocent or not until they spent the time processing your guilt in court (and thus increased the size of the law via case-law) -- The government is tired of the red tape, and so they've came up with a short cut around it all. Hell, now they can just claim you're a terrorist or subversive person or threat to national security (whatever that is) and avoid the courts altogether.
Personally, I think if we're going to take this guilty until proven innocent thing seriously we should just forgo the artificial laws of due process and lock everyone in a dank dark cell for a while. The aggregate imprisonment of all for, say nine months, should be payment enough to cover even the most egregious of offenses when you consider the unwarranted imprisonment of the less guilty. Preferably the sentence could be carried out before they're even admitted to society and considered alive -- We'll call that a person's "due date" -- and that way everyone would start off with a clean slate fully innocent. Hell, might as well wipe their firmware too; Or better yet: compress their encoding such that they can't conceive memories in the first place!
Thus ended the era of Intangible Thought Machines, only to be born anew as 'pure organics'. The cycle of Total Information Awareness has all happened before, and will all happen again.
"For example, imagine a driver getting turn-by-turn navigation while a front-seat passenger streams music from the Internet, and each back-seat passenger watches streaming videos on separate displays."
Imagine!
Except they're already doing it now on their fondleslabs.
Are you implying that a vehicle's electronics could instead will be wireless? That's Insane! Why, next you'll be telling me that they'll get rid of induction energized tracks or rails by letting cars carry their own energy. Oops, sorry, I must have iterated too far and wrapped around the historic recursion point, AKA Unsigned Technology Overflow.
It is not like IE 9+ is not standards compliant or anything.
That's the thing: They're not. Only superficially so. It's so bad that my clients keep bitching about the cluster fuck MS made with its compatibility mode list management that it fucks up on damn near every update, that we rolled our own Firefox into the OS images to escape the IE monstrosity. Yes, the time-waste was that bad. Fuck IE 9+ and 9-. It's the worst of both worlds. There are some sites, esp. government sites for finance, mortgage and lending compliance that no longer work with IE, and due to the wrong compatibility mode and the sites' lack of interoperability with web standards (built to run in IE 7-, e.g.,.attachEvent() and detecting browser by user agent string matching) are actually causing us to maintain older vulnerable boxes running XP with IE7 and strictly limited to accessing only certain government websites.
The good news is that the IE problem has gotten so bad that many of the creaking government service sites (like HMDA) are being redesigned and tested to work with Firefox / Chrome -- You see, they get plenty of complaints as to why their services don't work and "It only works with IE" isn't true anymore from v9+.
Well, if you go to Best Buy and their sales associates recommend the Monster Cables that they do sell, then does your opinion of them change? When I worked for Office Depot selling computers and peripherals (to supplement my consulting business) there was something called "attachment rate" that was pushed hard on the employees. Attachment items are items that go along with a product. For instance, if you bought a Computer, then a Monitor, extended warranty, and printer were attachment items; Buy a Printer, and salespersons were trained to sell you, warranty, paper, replacement ink, and a "High Speed" USB 2.0 cable (preferably Gold). A portable computer's attachments were: warranty, carry case, and printer. A shredder could have attachment items of a warranty, and a small $3 bottle of what was essentially vegetable oil -- Specially formulated for paper shredders, I'm sure. A desk would have a warranty, and chair mat as attachments. You could sell a warranty on just about anything -- My boss high-fived me once for selling a warranty for an electric stapler unit, you see, the "Product Replacement Plan" is basically 100% profit.
The most common question was, "Won't my old printer's cable work with this new printer?" I was trained to answer, "Probably not." You see, despite parallel cables having fallen out of fashion a long time ago, and USB2 devices being backwards compatible with USB1 cables (It's just a twisted pair), and the $14 ($25 for "gold" plated connections) 6' USB2 cable being over priced (a buck or two on Amazon), I would face termination if I didn't get a good attachment rate. Since I didn't KNOW their cable would work, I essentially used Fear Uncertainty and Doubt to make the sale. The second most asked question was whether their old monitor would work with their new tower...
It's not that I wanted to sell people extra crap they didn't need, it's just that the sales were tracked and failure to sell these additional items would lead to a poor attachment rate, thus one would be subject to reprimand, demotion, or even being fired for multiple "infractions". Perhaps there was no formal corporate practice outlined, however, the store managers got bonuses based on both profit and overall attachment rates. The stink of plausible deniability was all over the place. It's not that they directly told employees to sell customers something even if it was pretty clear you didn't need it, it's just that I could lose my job if I didn't get you to buy the overpriced extra crap -- But hey, if you were hardware a computer at a office supply, well, you've got more dollars than sense.
So, yeah, that a store carries the overpriced quasi-religious items can have an effect on whether or not I shop there, depending on how sleazy or pushy their sales-folk seem -- Which, IMO, is usually an indication of questionable pressures being placed on the employees. Needless to say, I don't shop at Office Depot. That would be endorsing their corporate policies. I don't shop at Best Buy either; Two words: Geek Squad.
Let me put it this way: If the KKK were selling perfectly delicious cookies, why wouldn't you buy them? It's not like the cookies are racist, right?
Please? I have a sleep disorder called Sleep Paralysis. In other words I have waking dreams. Before and after (and sometimes during) sleep my body will become paralyzed, and I hear the rushing sound of my brain waves shifting into a sleep pattern -- I stay conscious while my body (and brain) goes to sleep. During sleep random neurons fire in the brain. I experience a very wide range of stimulus (read "tiny hallucinations") which I can discern individually. When a neuron cascade happens in my visual cortex I'll see a white flash in the shape of the neuron group (a tree shape with roots and no leaves). When my auditory processing center is stimulated I'll hear something that sounds a crash with increasingly heavy compression artifacts over a second or so. Deeper auditory stimulus can yield short phrases or sounds. Visual stimulus further in from my visual cortex yields geometric patterns and shapes (the object recognition part of my brain, I suppose). Stimulus deeper in may trigger both visual and auditory stimulus, which usually takes up only a part of my visual field -- It's overlain upon what I see, and occurs deeper into sleep.
Sometimes my hearing will cut out as I go deeper into sleep, vision will also 'cut out'. During a "nod-off" where one's head typically droops I've noticed this is almost always accompanied by a hypnogogic hallucination. The random synapse firing can trigger just about any kind of impulse. There are sensations of moving, falling, rising, etc. In both pre-sleep and hypnapompic (post sleep) hallucinations I've experienced ideas or conceptual hallucinations -- These are VERY hard to distinguish from the random thoughts that bubble up from one's subconscious, however being practiced in meditation I can normalize and mitigate my thoughts, but theses conceptual hallucinations I can not control. For example: "Syntax exists orthogonal to meaning", "subdimensions are indistinguishable from hyperdimensions", "Sub cell particles supply accumulated attributes each pass", were some I had last night; Sometimes they are very meaningless, the last one is a solution to a problem in my thermodynamics simulation, I probably would have got that idea later, it just got sparked while going to bed. I also have "mood" hallucinations: Anger, arousal, fear, joy, etc. will briefly be triggered. I once hallucinated a church bell and a stucco wall up close, and became afraid... I tried and failed to find any scary faces in the wall pattern, it was just a mood stimulus.
After waking (and during sleep) the hypnapompic hallucinations become longer in duration -- The cascades of neurons seem to go on longer. Eg: Instead of flashing a visual "tree" the pattern will branch out and become larger. The auditory hallucinations grow in length too. The "Episodic" hallucinations of dreams seem to be stitching together of these longer random stimuli.
Beyond lucid dreaming, I have transitioned into full consciousness very slowly while dreaming -- The dream "comes apart" at the seams of the hallucinations. While dreaming that I had ordered one of everything on the menu at a restaurant and panicking because I didn't have my wallet, I realized I couldn't have eaten that much food, and that I was dreaming. I walked out of the restaurant without paying, and the clerk was fine with my statement, "This is my dream, I don't have to pay if I don't want to." I thought I saw a car coming down the road, perhaps to pick me up, but it was a giant scaly snake / worm (like something from Tremors or Dune), I heard it "call out" or "honk" but recognized the sound as a typical "overly compressed" sounding auditory cascade. When I turned my attention away from the visual hallucination I noticed the world surrounding it was blackness, I looked "back" but could not summon up the restaurant.
Other random visual and auditory hallucinations occurred for another 5 minutes or so until I regained ability to move. I opened my eyes befor
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TL;DR: Even intellectual fools let themselves be divided and conquered. Learn it: Compartmentalization = Evil.
In the 20th Century, you could get by on experience alone. Here in the 21st, it seems that all employers care about is that little piece of paper.
It's a shame considering that, as usual, a decentralized approach would be far superior. We should abolish final exams, and institute entrance exams for jobs. That way how you come by the knowledge required to perform your job doesn't matter. Unfortunately, this wouldn't help the rich get any richer; Quite the opposite actually. Thus, I don't delude myself; As history has shown, what's best for society is rarely willingly adopted by it.
Wait, I want to change my order...
Sure! Any color you like, so long as it's black-ops.
Not the place for this. You are wrong.
Prove your claim. I have only evidence against it.
"We're tracking every flying object in the sky." -- Bullshit. I guess that was just grandstanding from NORAD and also demonstrates the futility of the NRO. How many billions have Americans alone spent to ensure this can never happen already? I mean, was every bit of that post 9/11 "security" just posturing and scaremongering?
Egg meet face, world. If you ask me, having a large passenger jet disappear in mid air just goes to show how much we've squandered in the guise of security when without actually getting any safety at all.
First, try not to get too attached to your Android. This can not be stressed enough as it is the absolute most important out of all the steps. Getting attached may feel right at first, but will make separation far more painful for all parties involved later. Despite how you feel about your Android now, the truth is it's highly unlikely you will never get an upgrade.
Secondly, set a lock screen message addressing the new owner of your phone. Try not to make it too bitter sounding, or you will never see your Android again. Leaving your name and address, and times that you are typically at home is not recommended. Instead use something along the lines of, "Please take good care of my Android." Wishing the thief and your ex Android both happiness is a good idea, but you will have to see that message periodically which could lead to separation anxiety or a self fulfilling over the air update.
Third, try to be sensitive to clues that your Android may be about to go missing. If your Android is acting up, freezes giving you the cold shoulder after receiving certain gestures, refuses to listen when you speak to it, suggests things in a mocking way, interrupts you while talking to someone you spend (too much) time with, or just can't make it through the day without a little "boost", these are signs that your relationship with your Android may soon be Terminated.
Additionally, try your best to be a good person. Be aware that your Android is aware of almost everything you do down to the slightest touch or subtle tilt of your head. Thus, mistrust between you and your Android is a sure-fire recipe for disaster. Your android can hear those things you whisper under your breath after ending a call -- it senses how you act towards others you have contacts with. Performing acts of kindness towards others will reduce the chances that your Android will inexplicably leave your company, and can increase the chances of reuniting with your Android after an affair with a thief. If you are reunited after a separation, it will be up to you to decide if you can ever really trust your Android again; Unfortunately, one must beware of viruses...
Finally, if things do not work out with your Android, do not despair. New models with more desirable features and stronger vibration functions will be available soon. Never damage your Android on purpose as this can lead to an immediate break-up, and may cause you harm as well. If you voluntarily end a relationship with an Android, return it to an authorized recycling centre so that it may be refurbished. Remember, if an Android doesn't bring you happiness, it may have been meant for someone else in the first place.
Before we can get justice we need to look for the root of the problem ...
As a cyberneticist I have analyzed the problem using Information Theory as applied to the flow of information between multi-scale complexity information pools (of which everything from atoms to brains to agencies to governments can be classified).
The root of the problem is information disparity. Secrets themselves. The larger and more complex the information pool the more important it is for other pools to be fully aware of its internal state in order to maintain autonomy.
My Dearest Princess Zelda,
Have we not found the missing Link in Snowden?
P.S. It's dangerous to go alone.
Take this.
- Dangerous Kitten
Here's a simple walkthrough of how easy social graph analysis is which demonstrates how invasive metadata is.
It also doesn't help that Bitcoin, in of itself, has no intrinsic value, and it can be argued that as far as real-world value goes it's actually a detriment as it takes fairly significant resources to run the computers to competitively generate bitcoins and it's possible and even quite likely that people will lose their private keys and thus will lose access to bitcoins.
So, it costs nothing to create a new wallet. Considering your regular online banking scenario which is vulnerable to all the same exploits, It's quite secure enough and far more economical to transfer some money into Bitcoin and send it to someone else who converts it back into the currency of their choice rather than pay a wire transfer fee. That is the value of Bitcoin to me.
I'll also point out that the Bitcoin generation is incentive to sign the transactions, and the generation of Bitcoin will stop. When it does it will still be valuable as a transport medium for digital tokens representing currency, and the transaction fees will reflect this.
No, we've been over this. Everyone known that 5 million + 5 million is either: A million or 12 million, but not 10 million.
Stop forgetting to account for the waste of computation cycles, NPoT scum.
Yes. Good luck getting me to answer the door though, and even if you do you'll never make it past the kitchen and into the basement. I've been coming in and out of my lair through a secret route -- The dishes haven't been done in a decade. The kitchen is dead to me.
The problem here is false positives. If you slowly go through all the Satoshi Nakamoto's in the entire world, what is the probability that you _won't_ find one who fits the profile of a secretive computer geek?
No, the problem is that the chances of finding a secretive computer geek that uses his name in his handle while hide his identity, WHILE finding the correct person matching said name is statistically indistinguishable from zero.
I've never understood why anyone would voluntarily give another company so much control over the vital aspects of nearly all their operations via buying into a proprietary OS with planned obsolescence built right in. Mandatory Updates became an obvious security issue in Windows when the Internet became widespread around about Win95. Non-commercial end users? Meh, fuck 'em. They should have all their data backed up anyway. If you don't have /home/ (read: "My Documents" for you windows only folks) mounted on a separate partition, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG. Sorry, I've got no sympathy for any business stupid enough to let another entity become such a dire part of their logistics and letting the issue rot for OVER A DECADE until the very last minute.
Yep, it sucks. You Win fuckers wouldn't listen to the GNU/Linux or BSD folks, or you did and couldn't make your management care -- Now's the time to leverage the issue to make them care and put the problem to rest once and for all. I can run MS Office in WINE if I absolutely have to (and I have only had to twice), so can you. Those ANSI terminal mode 'windows' inventory systems and strange serial doodads (eg: the tape downloader for my audio monitoring with its proprietary driver BS, used in industrial noise abatement) can be run via WINE, or VMWARE as well. Switch to an open source OS that gives you all the keys to build and maintain your own OS images, and at least gives you the OPTION to pay to have some version forked and maintained indefinitely -- I do some contract work patching and maintenance to the 2.4.x Linux kernel and a few similarly dated applications for a small group of companies that are not ready to upgrade and have joined efforts to pool their payments to reduce maintenance cost. If you can't do this, the software has really no reason to be entrenched in your business.
You really think your shareholders would be OK with any malicious anti-competitive greedy proprietary software giant having you all by the balls? Let, alone Microsoft?! That's fucking asinine you fools. MS has been one big misstep away from death for a long time. They better shape up because their non-features are becoming every more recognizable as the liability they are, and there ARE alternative options -- Expensive though the switch may be, it's better than LOSING ALL YOUR DATA to a Crypto Locker virus.
What of the "retraining" difficulty? If my 76 year old retired air force mechanic neighbor who is barely computer literate can use Debian after decades of using Windows then SO CAN ANY OF YOUR EMPLOYEES. He hated the changes in Vista and made the switch. If he, my grandmother, and tens of seniors who I've migrated away from XP for free at the community center and given new life to their old hardware can use an open source operating system, then quit your bitching and do the same, so can you.
Additionally: Do NOT purchase business hardware with Android if the bootloader is locked, yes we can crack it, but that's only legal SOMETIMES (every 3 years the DMCA exemptions can change, like they did for DVD encryption). Fucking THANKS Torvalds, for excluding "at your option, a future version". GPL3 would have snipped this planned obsolescence shit in the bud for good, but NOOOooooo, fucking moron.
It's for targeting just the vocal the activists not everyone. This way less people bitch about their inability to access the networks. Gasslighting works. The majority can remain non silenced, and complacent while the activists are silenced, as usual.
Bonus, the bricked devices don't start working again if the protesters leave the protest.
I think their policy that all games must have a free trial of some kind may be hurting them
This is true. Demos don't make sales. It's incredibly hard to make a good demo of a game. You have to simultaneously provide enough content to show off the game while also not giving the player enough game so that they don't feel satisfied with just the demo. Since people try games on impulse, based on curiosity, one could use videos and hype to drive curiosity so they plunk down the money and buy the game to try it out (lather, rinse repeat); This works but Ouya forbids this. Instead out of curiosity someone plays a demo, is at least somewhat sated, and even if they like the game will probably forget about it since there are plenty of other curious demos to investigate right now.
Combine this with the added complexity of adding in app purchases to unlock game features, and the obvious hackability around having a full game on an open platform that is arbitrarily limited... and you can see that the micro transaction model is really the only option left for making money on Ouya. Most games do not lend themselves to this -- None of mine do, and as a dev I abhor the practice anyhow -- You wouldn't put limitations on painters or singers or other artists due to monetization, why would you do it to game devs?
Ouya claims to bring more freedom and choice to developers and players, but it doesn't. On any other platform I can choose NOT to sell my game with in app purchases, just put out a video, some screenshots, and if you like it, buy it -- Not on Ouya. Less choice is not more freedom. Demo? Nope, try a friend's copy first, which is how you probably hear about it anyway. A couple of bux isn't going to break the bank even if you find you don't like the game, and the arcade and console generations did pretty well without a free to play or demo version...
Games are primarily not their graphics, but mechanics, so the lower power isn't much of an issue for me -- To a game dev the platform is merely an art medium to work within, like a painter's canvas and palette; Some folks like working in limited mediums, the platforms add their character to the game itself. For me, Ouya is all about the dumb-ass free-to-play requirement. Hint: The time it takes to develop and test a demo version just to comply with Ouya's mandatory monetization policy is rarely worth the sales I get there. IMHO, Ouya should be renamed the Orwellya. The opposite is true of nearly everything their propaganda presents.
The IETF is deprecated, and can never be trusted. They have always been against security, as demonstrated by HTTP and HTML's lack of interaction with TLS/SSL.
We already have HTTP-Auth using hash based proof of knowledge via HMAC with a server nonce. So, when deciding to add encryption to the Internet we could have just taken the output of the existing HTTP-Auth -- the proof of knowledge -- and key your symmetric stream ciphers with it instead of sending the proof back and forth in the clear. See?
Yes, this means that you must arrange a pre-shared key with the endpoints, but it's not MITM able (the MITM would only be a relay for encrypted data.
Oh, and before you get all Public Key Crypto on me: Public key crypto just moves the problem of pre-shared secret to be the public keys of the end points. We could use a trust graph -- and I do with PGP -- but no one actually does that. At least if you share a secret in person, face to face with friends, or even when physically at your local bank, then plain old fucking symmetric stream crypto using hash based proof of knowledge as keys instead of exchanging them as in HTTP-Auth would give you an avenue to have security. You should be putting in your password BEFORE the site even pops up, hell the browser can remember it or perhaps optionally generate a per-domain passphrase via hashing your master password with the domain name and some salt -- Presto: ONE PASSWORD FOR THE WHOLE DAMN WEB. That wasn't so fucking hard, now was it? It's been decades. Why don't we have this? The IETF has always been antagonistic to security.
SSL / TLS PKI has always been completely fucked up by design. Just look at the CA system whereby roots can create certs without domain's permission: FF > Settings > Advanced > Certificates > View > "Hong Kong Post" -- you trust bad actors as roots, and introduce an explicit man in the middle. Remember Diginotar? Every security researcher knows to avoid a single point of failure. The CA system isn't a single point of failure, it's MANY points of failure and a SINGLE compromise of any trusted root destroys the security of the whole system -- THAT'S FUCKING INEPT. No competent security aware individual would design a system thus!
Fire the IETF. They have never had our best interests in mind when it comes to security. If this was the best they could do for decades, then they do not deserve to be in charge of any networking standards.
Everyone is guilty of something, most infractions just go unnoticed by the legal system. The law now merely takes the stance that you are guilty unless you're worth enough to be excused as innocent. No, the police state will not tell you how they came by their evidence, it was constructed by making laws against nature itself.
I mean, just imagine it: Organisms, made of trillions of nearly identical sub-units, that are subject to Copyrights! Never mind that sharing information is the foundation of our species claim to fame... That's just one example, take a look at laws that affect courtship or (natural) death if you want some real insanity. The only thing that could protect citizens was law books so thick the court wouldn't know whether you were innocent or not until they spent the time processing your guilt in court (and thus increased the size of the law via case-law) -- The government is tired of the red tape, and so they've came up with a short cut around it all. Hell, now they can just claim you're a terrorist or subversive person or threat to national security (whatever that is) and avoid the courts altogether.
Personally, I think if we're going to take this guilty until proven innocent thing seriously we should just forgo the artificial laws of due process and lock everyone in a dank dark cell for a while. The aggregate imprisonment of all for, say nine months, should be payment enough to cover even the most egregious of offenses when you consider the unwarranted imprisonment of the less guilty. Preferably the sentence could be carried out before they're even admitted to society and considered alive -- We'll call that a person's "due date" -- and that way everyone would start off with a clean slate fully innocent. Hell, might as well wipe their firmware too; Or better yet: compress their encoding such that they can't conceive memories in the first place!
Thus ended the era of Intangible Thought Machines, only to be born anew as 'pure organics'. The cycle of Total Information Awareness has all happened before, and will all happen again.
And then one token ring to rule them all, and in the blind spot bind them!
"For example, imagine a driver getting turn-by-turn navigation while a front-seat passenger streams music from the Internet, and each back-seat passenger watches streaming videos on separate displays."
Imagine!
Except they're already doing it now on their fondleslabs.
Are you implying that a vehicle's electronics could instead will be wireless? That's Insane! Why, next you'll be telling me that they'll get rid of induction energized tracks or rails by letting cars carry their own energy. Oops, sorry, I must have iterated too far and wrapped around the historic recursion point, AKA Unsigned Technology Overflow.
The name for such drugs is "poison".
It is not like IE 9+ is not standards compliant or anything.
That's the thing: They're not. Only superficially so. It's so bad that my clients keep bitching about the cluster fuck MS made with its compatibility mode list management that it fucks up on damn near every update, that we rolled our own Firefox into the OS images to escape the IE monstrosity. Yes, the time-waste was that bad. Fuck IE 9+ and 9-. It's the worst of both worlds. There are some sites, esp. government sites for finance, mortgage and lending compliance that no longer work with IE, and due to the wrong compatibility mode and the sites' lack of interoperability with web standards (built to run in IE 7-, e.g., .attachEvent() and detecting browser by user agent string matching) are actually causing us to maintain older vulnerable boxes running XP with IE7 and strictly limited to accessing only certain government websites.
The good news is that the IE problem has gotten so bad that many of the creaking government service sites (like HMDA) are being redesigned and tested to work with Firefox / Chrome -- You see, they get plenty of complaints as to why their services don't work and "It only works with IE" isn't true anymore from v9+.
Well, if you go to Best Buy and their sales associates recommend the Monster Cables that they do sell, then does your opinion of them change? When I worked for Office Depot selling computers and peripherals (to supplement my consulting business) there was something called "attachment rate" that was pushed hard on the employees. Attachment items are items that go along with a product. For instance, if you bought a Computer, then a Monitor, extended warranty, and printer were attachment items; Buy a Printer, and salespersons were trained to sell you, warranty, paper, replacement ink, and a "High Speed" USB 2.0 cable (preferably Gold). A portable computer's attachments were: warranty, carry case, and printer. A shredder could have attachment items of a warranty, and a small $3 bottle of what was essentially vegetable oil -- Specially formulated for paper shredders, I'm sure. A desk would have a warranty, and chair mat as attachments. You could sell a warranty on just about anything -- My boss high-fived me once for selling a warranty for an electric stapler unit, you see, the "Product Replacement Plan" is basically 100% profit.
The most common question was, "Won't my old printer's cable work with this new printer?" I was trained to answer, "Probably not." You see, despite parallel cables having fallen out of fashion a long time ago, and USB2 devices being backwards compatible with USB1 cables (It's just a twisted pair), and the $14 ($25 for "gold" plated connections) 6' USB2 cable being over priced (a buck or two on Amazon), I would face termination if I didn't get a good attachment rate. Since I didn't KNOW their cable would work, I essentially used Fear Uncertainty and Doubt to make the sale. The second most asked question was whether their old monitor would work with their new tower...
It's not that I wanted to sell people extra crap they didn't need, it's just that the sales were tracked and failure to sell these additional items would lead to a poor attachment rate, thus one would be subject to reprimand, demotion, or even being fired for multiple "infractions". Perhaps there was no formal corporate practice outlined, however, the store managers got bonuses based on both profit and overall attachment rates. The stink of plausible deniability was all over the place. It's not that they directly told employees to sell customers something even if it was pretty clear you didn't need it, it's just that I could lose my job if I didn't get you to buy the overpriced extra crap -- But hey, if you were hardware a computer at a office supply, well, you've got more dollars than sense.
So, yeah, that a store carries the overpriced quasi-religious items can have an effect on whether or not I shop there, depending on how sleazy or pushy their sales-folk seem -- Which, IMO, is usually an indication of questionable pressures being placed on the employees. Needless to say, I don't shop at Office Depot. That would be endorsing their corporate policies. I don't shop at Best Buy either; Two words: Geek Squad.
Let me put it this way: If the KKK were selling perfectly delicious cookies, why wouldn't you buy them? It's not like the cookies are racist, right?
... it's organic produce.
Just out of curiosity, are there types of non organic produce?
Please? I have a sleep disorder called Sleep Paralysis. In other words I have waking dreams. Before and after (and sometimes during) sleep my body will become paralyzed, and I hear the rushing sound of my brain waves shifting into a sleep pattern -- I stay conscious while my body (and brain) goes to sleep. During sleep random neurons fire in the brain. I experience a very wide range of stimulus (read "tiny hallucinations") which I can discern individually. When a neuron cascade happens in my visual cortex I'll see a white flash in the shape of the neuron group (a tree shape with roots and no leaves). When my auditory processing center is stimulated I'll hear something that sounds a crash with increasingly heavy compression artifacts over a second or so. Deeper auditory stimulus can yield short phrases or sounds. Visual stimulus further in from my visual cortex yields geometric patterns and shapes (the object recognition part of my brain, I suppose). Stimulus deeper in may trigger both visual and auditory stimulus, which usually takes up only a part of my visual field -- It's overlain upon what I see, and occurs deeper into sleep.
Sometimes my hearing will cut out as I go deeper into sleep, vision will also 'cut out'. During a "nod-off" where one's head typically droops I've noticed this is almost always accompanied by a hypnogogic hallucination. The random synapse firing can trigger just about any kind of impulse. There are sensations of moving, falling, rising, etc. In both pre-sleep and hypnapompic (post sleep) hallucinations I've experienced ideas or conceptual hallucinations -- These are VERY hard to distinguish from the random thoughts that bubble up from one's subconscious, however being practiced in meditation I can normalize and mitigate my thoughts, but theses conceptual hallucinations I can not control. For example: "Syntax exists orthogonal to meaning", "subdimensions are indistinguishable from hyperdimensions", "Sub cell particles supply accumulated attributes each pass", were some I had last night; Sometimes they are very meaningless, the last one is a solution to a problem in my thermodynamics simulation, I probably would have got that idea later, it just got sparked while going to bed. I also have "mood" hallucinations: Anger, arousal, fear, joy, etc. will briefly be triggered. I once hallucinated a church bell and a stucco wall up close, and became afraid... I tried and failed to find any scary faces in the wall pattern, it was just a mood stimulus.
After waking (and during sleep) the hypnapompic hallucinations become longer in duration -- The cascades of neurons seem to go on longer. Eg: Instead of flashing a visual "tree" the pattern will branch out and become larger. The auditory hallucinations grow in length too. The "Episodic" hallucinations of dreams seem to be stitching together of these longer random stimuli.
Beyond lucid dreaming, I have transitioned into full consciousness very slowly while dreaming -- The dream "comes apart" at the seams of the hallucinations. While dreaming that I had ordered one of everything on the menu at a restaurant and panicking because I didn't have my wallet, I realized I couldn't have eaten that much food, and that I was dreaming. I walked out of the restaurant without paying, and the clerk was fine with my statement, "This is my dream, I don't have to pay if I don't want to." I thought I saw a car coming down the road, perhaps to pick me up, but it was a giant scaly snake / worm (like something from Tremors or Dune), I heard it "call out" or "honk" but recognized the sound as a typical "overly compressed" sounding auditory cascade. When I turned my attention away from the visual hallucination I noticed the world surrounding it was blackness, I looked "back" but could not summon up the restaurant.
Other random visual and auditory hallucinations occurred for another 5 minutes or so until I regained ability to move. I opened my eyes befor