And I am half German too. (No idea what the relevance is to anything, but apparently there is some)
It's a pre-emptive strike against being called a bigot for daring to criticize the policies of a government or country to which you are not native. People get that a lot, hence the poster's reflexive flinch and disclaimner. I've experienced that in the UK for daring to point out the obvious, because, despite being a dual citizen, my accent is North American. My wife (who is English) gets the same shit when she criticizes an obvious flaw in America. These are classic cases of territorial identity and nationalism trumping critical thought, and the GP obviously wanted to avoid that. Which he by and large did, but not without the cost of this tangent.:-)
Except that the Droid phones typically have none of those problems. As shocking as it may seem, somebody besides Apple actually does make a phone that works well.
Don't tell him that. iSlaves don't cope well when non-Jobsian reality intrudes into their walled garden...you might traumatize him for life.
Which would still imply that the Democrats share some of the blame, because at no point in recent memory have the Republicans had veto-proof majorities in both Houses of Congress on their own.
Yes, spineless (and/or corrupt) democrats are part of the problem. Which part of my post lambasting spineless democrats for exactly that sort of behavior didn't you bother to read?
That said, spineless democrats were not the ones who drove the toxic "de-regulate everything, the market will do all that is good, cure all of society's ills, and save us all" agenda that engineered this collapse, nor did they drive the angenda that engineered a similar collapse that led directly to the Great Depression (in fact, the reason we had a great depression was because of republican tightening of monetary policy for many of the reasons the right espouses such things today, with disasterous results). In both cases it was republican thinking, republican policy, and replublican action that led to the disaster...thankfully this time we have a government willing to loosen monetary policy and steer clear of the worst carnage a great depression would bring.
Will we have to pay for it? You bet.
Will it hurt? Most assuradly.
Would we have been better off "letting the market decide" and riding this collapse down into the belly of another Great Depression? Not on your life.
Why don't you just own up to the fact that the Democrat's hands are just as dirty as those of the GOP?
Because they aren't. As despicable as spineless acquiescence is, it is a far cry from crafting, pursing, and lobbying for policies that are designed to gut government regulation of an industry that history has shown time and time again needs effective regulation, and which history has shown time and time again will create the very mayhem we have recently experienced. Not that I'm applauding spineless or corrupt democrats either, but a congress full of spineless, greedy fools is far less dangerous than a congress full of "let's gut government to the core, so I can make more off my oil well" zealots. Not that either is good, and not to say I don't despite both.
Imagine having a wrist calculator that was more reliable than a solar calculator, but you have to eat a bit more.
Let's reverse the flow. Imagine going outside into the sun, and not needing to eat for a day.
Of course, this turns the the whole weight-loss idea on its head. Sunbathing is the new binging: go to the beach paper-thin in your new bikini, and never leave because you've become too morbidly obese to move. Oops.
On the plus side, it could be sold as a cure for world hunger. Bonus points for being green if it makes people sterile in the process (your kids are your biggest carbon footprint, so just say yes to contraception).
What are you, some sort of Democratic partisan? The repeal of Glass-Steagall was signed into law by Bill Clinton.
What are you, a Republican partisan? A republican controlled congress introduced the legislation and passed it with a veto-proof majority. Of course Clinton signed the bill. To do otherwise was to ensure he suffered a humiliating veto, and paint him as the odd-one out in a time when most powerful lobbies, media organisations, and parties were hell-bent on deregulating everything.
That said, I blame the democrats just us much. Not for the current crisis, which was by and large a natural consequence of conservative "deregulate everything and let the market decide" thinking, but for not having the backbone to oppose this shit on principle even when it was in vogue, and for not pointing the finger more loudly at those responsible: Republicans and so-called "blue dog" democrats that have spent the last 20 years dismantling the regulatory structures put into place after the last depression, which were largely responsible for the economic stability we enjoyed throughout most of the 20th century, and for doing so in the wake of the Savings and Loan scandals which had already amply demonstrated exactly why the banking industry shouldn't be deregulated in this way.
There's plenty of bad governance on all sides, but this economic collapse was a direct result of the policies that stemmed from right-wing "get the government out of business" knee-jerk deregulation, of which the republican repeal of Glass-Steagall (with the "bipartisan" help of conservative blue-dog democrats-only-in-name and a centrist democratic president who, frankly, behaved more like a republican than most republicans after his health-care reform failed) was but one part of the problem.
And please don't start claiming this was driven by liberal requirements for fair-lending practices...there was never a mandate to lend to people who couldn't pay back their loans. That particular Republican talking point has been debunked more times than anyone can count. CDSes and exotics required debt to be underwritten, and it was pure profit motive for more debt, to sell more exotics, to line the pockets of greedy inside-traders with more money, that required more lending, far and away beyond anything required or encouraged by the US government. This was deregulated markets in action, "greed is good" in an environment of historically low interset rates kept low for political purposes by the Bush administration, leading to a very natural and predictable result.
It's time to retire the Bill Gates Borg photo and replace it with a Steve Jobs Borg photo for Apple stories.
Why can't we have both? Yes, Steve Jobs has relegated his customer base to peasants and iSlaves, only allowed to run the software he blesses, look at the portions of the web he deems suitable, and operate within the walled-in apple orchard he has in a very authoritarian way decreed. Yes, he employs Orwellian speech in much the same way as Microsoft (describing his attack on the free nature of the Internet as "freedom from porn"), but that doesn't make Microsoft any less of an abusive monopoly.
We need two Icons, one for Bill Gates of Borg, and one capturing the essence of iSlavery. Perhaps two wrists cuffed together with shackles in the form of an iPhone?
I certainly wouldn't "retire" the Bill Gates of Borg icon or replace it. We now have two aggressive corporations aspiring to trample and eradicate our freedoms, it would be foolish to pretend one has "replaced" the other. Both are there, actively attacking our freedoms to enhance their bottom lines, through all means legal and semi-legal. We should have two icons emphesizing and reminding us of that fact.
They can sell information on everyone you called, use speech recognition to monetize the content of your calls. And since you voluntarily brought a phone into your life, why turn off the microphone just because you aren't making a call? Just continuously record everything in the vicinity - there must be a wealth of data there that someone would pay for.
Why stop there? Most phones these days come with at least one camera, many with two. Activate both, and stream the data back to a data collection point. Do image search and color-gradient analysis, pick out those that indicate some hanky panky, hire some folks in the far east for a dollar a day to comb through the video data and pick out only those streams that show people in a comprimising position, and then monetize in one of the following ways:
1. Blackmail your victim^H^H^H^H^H customer (a monthly fee not to tell the missus/mister what you've been up to in your cubical at 10pm last night, or to not send your family intimate pics of your honeymoon, etc.)
2. For those who won't or can't pay, hire another set of people with video editing skills to weave together full length videos of people's intimiate moments, and sell online.
3. Charge a premium for videos of people who 'live near you'.
4. Profit!
Bonus points for those iPhone holding iSlaves... they can provide the content, but their 'freedom from porn' ensures they can't watch it (at least not on their iShackles).
I mean, it's not as if we have any real rights anyway, once there's a bottom line to be made, and it isn't like this is any creepier than the 'dead peasants insurance' most of our employers have taken out on us already.
Just quit it already you god damn souless junk peddlers. We're sick and tired of hearing about apple.
He can't stop. iSlaves simply cannot stop, ever. They are beholden to Jobs, they run only the software he tells them they are allowed to, they buy the devices he tells them to, and they badger the rest of us to buy into their shiny crippleware. Knowing iSlaves is like being friends (or worse, related to) Mormons or members of any other cult... they simply will not stop trying to force you to think like them. Ever.
Just quit it already you god damn souless junk peddlers. We're sick and tired of hearing about apple.
He can't stop. iSlaves simply cannot stop, ever. They are beholden to Jobs, they run only the software he tells them they are allowed to, they buy the devices he tells them to, and they badger the rest of us to buy into their shiny crippleware. Knowing iSlaves is like being friends (or worse, related to) Mormons or members of any other cult... they simply will not stop trying to force you to think like them. Ever.
5) They make themselves available as paid articles for the iPad, make them glossy enough, and actually make some money, whilst at the same time allowing Google limited access to to their headlines to act as a teaser to draw people in
Yeah, but that would mean drinking both Murdoch's and Jobs' cool-aid and becoming an iSlave, and no one is stupid enough to do that...oh wait, we're talking about Murdoch's minions here. Nevermind.
I used to think Declan McCullough was a reasonably intelligent fellow, but this is just a propaganda piece.
You really need to do a little background check on Mr. McCullough. Google his name in relation to LiViD (the earliest attempt at getting DVDs to play on Linux. He was single handedly responsible for getting the MPAA riled up against the free software world, and the legal troubles of several developers at that time.
They weren't the last free software developers that jerk shit on, by a long shot.
He is obviuosly still butt-buddies with one or more of the editors at slashdot since they still seem to give his appalling tripe preference over more intelligent and balanced news stories (I won't use the term 'reporting' for McCullough's form of yellow 'journalism')...must be some nice kickbacks in there for the slashdot people.
Honestly, I've been posting on this site for many years (as you can probably see by my relatively low/. id), but this love affair between/. and that particular piece of excrement makes me want to reconsider. Replacing links in submissions as happened with yesterday's "tabnapping" story just reinforces the notion that a better portal than slashdot is sorely needed, and soon. (No, I don't mean digg, much as I enjoy it at times)
It will never work out. The special effects explosions in action movies are hell on the furniture.
Worse still were the neighbors complaints after the snow scenes in Lord of the Rings when the Fellowship tried to cross the misty mountains before turning back and heading to Moria. Seems the melt required for the next scene seeped through the floorboards and flooded their flat (and the five floors beneath them). Oh well, still damn good entertainment.
You're absolutely correct that property rights play a huge role in American culture and thought. I wouldn't have thought very much of this until somebody pointed out to me that there are no trespassing laws in Scotland. None at all....and honestly, they get by just fine without them, as unfathomable as it was for my American mind to ponder.
It's similar in England (where I've lived for the past 3.5 years). You have the right of public access to farm fields, beaches, hills, you name it. So much so that farmers build and maintain gates and steps over fences to facilitate hikers crossing their fields. And you no what? It makes a much nicer, more enjoyable place to live than locales with big barbed wire fences and signs saying "No Tresspassing" or, even worse "Tresspassers will be Shot".
No, its google, so its cool to jump on their case for everything they do, legitimate or otherwise.
Hardly. When google pandered to China, although far less so than Microsoft and Yahoo, there was scathing criticism (and rightly so).
This, however, is a clear cut case of there being nothing to this at all, except a chance for governments with an interest in suppressing the free flow of information looking for a big club with which to threaten Google whenever Google helps disseminate information they don't want disseminated, or competes against a company that has lined the ruling politicians' pockets.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this as a prelude to the media cartels attacking google for allowing torrents to show up in search results, or some other anti-competative attack from some other quarter (Apple, Facebook... could be any of a growing number of enemies Google is making as it gives away what so many others want to force us to buy), though it could well just be a typical government powergrab on an international scale.
You know, we wouldn't even have this problem if we didn't try to prohibit Americans from so many things...
We brought this on ourselves with our own rhetoric (not just right-wing religious crap that results in things like the war on drugs, legalized discrimination against gays, and a steady erosion in women's rights, but right-wing libertarian rhetoric about the supremacy of the market for solving all the world's ills and making businesses more powerful than democratically elected governments, and left-wing political correctness that had people fired for speaking controversially about certain topics).
Indeed, we wouldn't have this particular problem if people weren't propagating moronic notions of "property rights" trumping every other constitutional right, including that of free speech (and freedom of association). If freedom of speech applied, as it was intended, everywhere, for everyone, then you couldn't be fired for saying something stupid, be it to your colleagues, your flatmate, your co-workers (outside of business hours), or whoever, in whatever medium.
But we've lost track of that--now people, especially in the United States, promote the notion that "speech has consequences", which is true, but not the way they mean, and not like this. Getting fired for bad jokes is not a "natural consequence" of telling bad jokes any more than landing in prison for saying something the government (or a powerful business leader with friends in government) doesn't like. Both are an artifice to suppress speech and, in this particular case, an excuse to replace one person with seniority with someone else who is no doubt cheaper and more compliant. Scare people into compliance AND replace an experienced worker with a newbie who will work for peanuts: two birds, one stone.
Thanks to libertarian group-think, we are no longer citizens with constitutional freedoms and rights, we are merely peasants, living and eating at the sufferance of our corporate masters. And you know what? Most of us are too busy arguing vehemently for the rights of our masters to do whatever they want in the name of "it's their property, so no 'government' (read: constitutional) constraint should ever apply. Ridiculous, but the country is lousy with people who think exactly that, consequences be damned.
"Love is hate", "no is yes", "war is peace", and we live in a free society. Just so long as you don't actually try to exercize those freedoms against the wishes of your corporate master.
A reason that copyright extends past death is to discourage murder to get access to copyrighted material.
I'm sure that's the spin policymakers put on it when they deformed copyright law. A better approach to discouraging murder would be to have set copyright terms...which coincidentally, was what we used to have. It used to be you could tell if a work was in copyright or not by looking at the copyright notice, subtracting it from the current year, and seeing if the result was greater than the copyright term. If you want the equivalent of "life plus fifty years" to benefit the kids, make copyright equal to the median life span + 50 years, and make that the set term. If you want more innovation, reduce that back to something reasonable, like 20 years.
Making copyright life+50 to avoid a mass of murdered authors is bullshit...that problem goes away as soon as you decouple copyright from an author's demise, as was its original implementation (in the US at least...in the UK, the earliest forms of proto-copyright went on forever, and some works still fall in the category).
If a company has a device that doesn't support tethering, why would you buy their products if you want to tether it? Why hype-up that they've "finally" included the damn thing, when it's been a standard feature on phones since GPRS and Bluetooth were available (my phone does it and that was released in 2003)?
NOOOO!!! Now you've done it! Asking a rhetorical questions founded on logic will bring Jobs' iSlaves out of the woodwork, screaming apologist tripe and nonsense defending the indefensible stance of their master and the crippled incapabilities of their jailed iPhones for the next 300 post. There goes the signal to noise ratio (and the neighborhood)...
What is the difference between hacking the Pentagon because you believe in aliens and hacking the Pentagon because you believe in Allah?
Everything.
While the mechanics of cracking system security may be the same, what you intend to do with the information you uncover, and your broader intentions against the US (if any) are very different.
In the case of Aliens, you're not exactly looking to fly planes into buildings, blow up cars in Times Square, or behead journalists. In the case of Allah, these intentions have already been demonstrated rather unequivocally in the real world, so extrapolating threats based on variations of past performance is not unreasonable, nor likely to yield broadly inaccurate predictions. Until flying-saucer nuts start threatening non-believers with death and mayhem, I'll tend to treat them as harmless eccentrics rather than potential terrorists, even when they cross the line and stupidly try to break into military computers.
There's absolutely no reason for the US to go after this guy--he's got a mental disorder, has already been severely chastened for his actions, is clearly not a threat to the US (or anyone else), and isn't likely to survive the so-called 'justice' America has in store for him.
Uhm... no, it's NOT possible. It's not possible for a CONSTANT to change;) Then it wouldn't be a constant, and we could have to rename it.
Exactly. Understanding our universe would involve deterimine what causes universal constants (universal variables?) to change over time. Assuming the change is not completely random (in which case, understanding our universe would become a great deal more difficult-though not necessarily impossible), a function over time or relationship to some other changing characteristic of the universe should emerge.
And no, it's not going to be some stupid Heinleinian "god made things old to fuck with us" kind of thing... it will just mean the universe is far more interesting and magnifiscent that we (and most especially, more than the creationists) ever imagined.
There's been a big push in recent years to move to "COTS" (Commercial Off The Shelf) solutions in the government - the military in particular. And while this may be find for things like holsters, backpacks, and office chairs, I think this highlights for EVERYONE, not just bright young aquisitions officers, that sometimes taking COTS technology and using it for your highly specific and critical application is not the best choice. Unfortunately, sometimes (sometimes!) big, expensive, and proprietary in-house solutions really are the best.
No, what it drives home is that, when you purchase a piece of hardware, it belongs to you, and no vendor should have the legal right to modify what you have purchased without your consent, nor to coerce consent for modifications that reduce or cripple the capabilities of something you have purchased.
Maybe now that military and commercial interests are being impacted, we can get the barest modicum of consumer protection to outlaw this shit (and similar, retroactive software modifications as well, such as Steve Jobs foists upon his hapless iPhone slaves... it all eventually amounts to the same thing, and puts a lot more than the military at risk).
I know for our trading platforms we would never tolerate this kind of thing from a vendor (and Apple has lost out on this on more than one occasion for exactly this reason). I'm amazed the military hasn't come down on Sony like a ton of bricks -- a large investment bank certainly would have.
I think at this point, it would have to be...years of successfully controlling leaks, and then a prototype for the same product line gets leaked TWICE within weeks of each other? Yeah...I could believe the first one to be an honest mistake, but there is no way this one wasn't planned./tinfoil hat
This time...maybe, as an attempt to turn lemons into lemonade with the last leak. But the fact that they sumarily fired the engineer who left the iPhone in the beergarden, and sent the swat team in after the reporters who reported it, indicates that at the very least, the first leak was unintential and that Steve Jobs only comment was something along the lines of "we are not amused."
Saying that you want to vote the bastards out of office is reasonable.
The Republicans and the Democrats do not follow the laws of this nation, period. They spend their days harassing 'we the people' with new laws and regulations. They do it for bribes, money, and power. Who gave them the right to break the laws and harass individuals?
Who gave you the right to be judge, jury, and executioner? If these people are breaking the law, they can be prosecuted and jailed. Unfortunatley, by and large they aren't. What they're doing is passing laws you don't like (and therefor take as 'personal harrassment'), and you don't like the motivation you assume (perhaps rightly) they have. Too bad. If they're breaking the law, prove it and have them prosecuted. If they're not, and you don't like what they're doing, then work to reform the law so that the campaign contributions (bribes) they're taking are no longer legal.
Saying that you want to see criminal prosecutions against those who you believe have acted illegally is reasonable.
Really? How reasonable is it when the judicial branch of our government doesn't even follow the laws?
What you mean is: they don't follow your specific, dogmatic, and fringe interpretation of the laws and constitution.
Threatening violence is not.
George Washington and friends didn't get rid of Big British Government by threatening legal action, writing petitions, and holding meetings. George Washington and friends got rid of Big British Government through the killing of thousands of British Government employees.
OK, nevermind, I'm wasting my time talking to a nutball.
You sir are a fucking menace to civilized people everywhere. Please stay the fuck out of my neighborhood. In fact, stay the fuck out of my state.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally can't wait to see what measures this new software takes to control its users and limit their access to other programs.
A suspect a new, tighter collar for all the iSlaves out there, along with a much shorter leash. But hey, it's from Apple and it's shiny!
And I am half German too. (No idea what the relevance is to anything, but apparently there is some)
It's a pre-emptive strike against being called a bigot for daring to criticize the policies of a government or country to which you are not native. People get that a lot, hence the poster's reflexive flinch and disclaimner. I've experienced that in the UK for daring to point out the obvious, because, despite being a dual citizen, my accent is North American. My wife (who is English) gets the same shit when she criticizes an obvious flaw in America. These are classic cases of territorial identity and nationalism trumping critical thought, and the GP obviously wanted to avoid that. Which he by and large did, but not without the cost of this tangent. :-)
Except that the Droid phones typically have none of those problems. As shocking as it may seem, somebody besides Apple actually does make a phone that works well.
Don't tell him that. iSlaves don't cope well when non-Jobsian reality intrudes into their walled garden...you might traumatize him for life.
Which would still imply that the Democrats share some of the blame, because at no point in recent memory have the Republicans had veto-proof majorities in both Houses of Congress on their own.
Yes, spineless (and/or corrupt) democrats are part of the problem. Which part of my post lambasting spineless democrats for exactly that sort of behavior didn't you bother to read?
That said, spineless democrats were not the ones who drove the toxic "de-regulate everything, the market will do all that is good, cure all of society's ills, and save us all" agenda that engineered this collapse, nor did they drive the angenda that engineered a similar collapse that led directly to the Great Depression (in fact, the reason we had a great depression was because of republican tightening of monetary policy for many of the reasons the right espouses such things today, with disasterous results). In both cases it was republican thinking, republican policy, and replublican action that led to the disaster...thankfully this time we have a government willing to loosen monetary policy and steer clear of the worst carnage a great depression would bring.
Will we have to pay for it? You bet.
Will it hurt? Most assuradly.
Would we have been better off "letting the market decide" and riding this collapse down into the belly of another Great Depression? Not on your life.
Why don't you just own up to the fact that the Democrat's hands are just as dirty as those of the GOP?
Because they aren't. As despicable as spineless acquiescence is, it is a far cry from crafting, pursing, and lobbying for policies that are designed to gut government regulation of an industry that history has shown time and time again needs effective regulation, and which history has shown time and time again will create the very mayhem we have recently experienced. Not that I'm applauding spineless or corrupt democrats either, but a congress full of spineless, greedy fools is far less dangerous than a congress full of "let's gut government to the core, so I can make more off my oil well" zealots. Not that either is good, and not to say I don't despite both.
Imagine having a wrist calculator that was more reliable than a solar calculator, but you have to eat a bit more.
Let's reverse the flow. Imagine going outside into the sun, and not needing to eat for a day.
Of course, this turns the the whole weight-loss idea on its head. Sunbathing is the new binging: go to the beach paper-thin in your new bikini, and never leave because you've become too morbidly obese to move. Oops.
On the plus side, it could be sold as a cure for world hunger. Bonus points for being green if it makes people sterile in the process (your kids are your biggest carbon footprint, so just say yes to contraception).
What are you, some sort of Democratic partisan? The repeal of Glass-Steagall was signed into law by Bill Clinton.
What are you, a Republican partisan? A republican controlled congress introduced the legislation and passed it with a veto-proof majority. Of course Clinton signed the bill. To do otherwise was to ensure he suffered a humiliating veto, and paint him as the odd-one out in a time when most powerful lobbies, media organisations, and parties were hell-bent on deregulating everything.
That said, I blame the democrats just us much. Not for the current crisis, which was by and large a natural consequence of conservative "deregulate everything and let the market decide" thinking, but for not having the backbone to oppose this shit on principle even when it was in vogue, and for not pointing the finger more loudly at those responsible: Republicans and so-called "blue dog" democrats that have spent the last 20 years dismantling the regulatory structures put into place after the last depression, which were largely responsible for the economic stability we enjoyed throughout most of the 20th century, and for doing so in the wake of the Savings and Loan scandals which had already amply demonstrated exactly why the banking industry shouldn't be deregulated in this way.
There's plenty of bad governance on all sides, but this economic collapse was a direct result of the policies that stemmed from right-wing "get the government out of business" knee-jerk deregulation, of which the republican repeal of Glass-Steagall (with the "bipartisan" help of conservative blue-dog democrats-only-in-name and a centrist democratic president who, frankly, behaved more like a republican than most republicans after his health-care reform failed) was but one part of the problem.
And please don't start claiming this was driven by liberal requirements for fair-lending practices...there was never a mandate to lend to people who couldn't pay back their loans. That particular Republican talking point has been debunked more times than anyone can count. CDSes and exotics required debt to be underwritten, and it was pure profit motive for more debt, to sell more exotics, to line the pockets of greedy inside-traders with more money, that required more lending, far and away beyond anything required or encouraged by the US government. This was deregulated markets in action, "greed is good" in an environment of historically low interset rates kept low for political purposes by the Bush administration, leading to a very natural and predictable result.
It's time to retire the Bill Gates Borg photo and replace it with a Steve Jobs Borg photo for Apple stories.
Why can't we have both? Yes, Steve Jobs has relegated his customer base to peasants and iSlaves, only allowed to run the software he blesses, look at the portions of the web he deems suitable, and operate within the walled-in apple orchard he has in a very authoritarian way decreed. Yes, he employs Orwellian speech in much the same way as Microsoft (describing his attack on the free nature of the Internet as "freedom from porn"), but that doesn't make Microsoft any less of an abusive monopoly.
We need two Icons, one for Bill Gates of Borg, and one capturing the essence of iSlavery. Perhaps two wrists cuffed together with shackles in the form of an iPhone?
I certainly wouldn't "retire" the Bill Gates of Borg icon or replace it. We now have two aggressive corporations aspiring to trample and eradicate our freedoms, it would be foolish to pretend one has "replaced" the other. Both are there, actively attacking our freedoms to enhance their bottom lines, through all means legal and semi-legal. We should have two icons emphesizing and reminding us of that fact.
They can sell information on everyone you called, use speech recognition to monetize the content of your calls. And since you voluntarily brought a phone into your life, why turn off the microphone just because you aren't making a call? Just continuously record everything in the vicinity - there must be a wealth of data there that someone would pay for.
Why stop there? Most phones these days come with at least one camera, many with two. Activate both, and stream the data back to a data collection point. Do image search and color-gradient analysis, pick out those that indicate some hanky panky, hire some folks in the far east for a dollar a day to comb through the video data and pick out only those streams that show people in a comprimising position, and then monetize in one of the following ways:
1. Blackmail your victim^H^H^H^H^H customer (a monthly fee not to tell the missus/mister what you've been up to in your cubical at 10pm last night, or to not send your family intimate pics of your honeymoon, etc.)
2. For those who won't or can't pay, hire another set of people with video editing skills to weave together full length videos of people's intimiate moments, and sell online.
3. Charge a premium for videos of people who 'live near you'.
4. Profit!
Bonus points for those iPhone holding iSlaves ... they can provide the content, but their 'freedom from porn' ensures they can't watch it (at least not on their iShackles).
I mean, it's not as if we have any real rights anyway, once there's a bottom line to be made, and it isn't like this is any creepier than the 'dead peasants insurance' most of our employers have taken out on us already.
Just quit it already you god damn souless junk peddlers. We're sick and tired of hearing about apple.
He can't stop. iSlaves simply cannot stop, ever. They are beholden to Jobs, they run only the software he tells them they are allowed to, they buy the devices he tells them to, and they badger the rest of us to buy into their shiny crippleware. Knowing iSlaves is like being friends (or worse, related to) Mormons or members of any other cult ... they simply will not stop trying to force you to think like them. Ever.
Just quit it already you god damn souless junk peddlers. We're sick and tired of hearing about apple.
He can't stop. iSlaves simply cannot stop, ever. They are beholden to Jobs, they run only the software he tells them they are allowed to, they buy the devices he tells them to, and they badger the rest of us to buy into their shiny crippleware. Knowing iSlaves is like being friends (or worse, related to) Mormons or members of any other cult ... they simply will not stop trying to force you to think like them. Ever.
5) They make themselves available as paid articles for the iPad, make them glossy enough, and actually make some money, whilst at the same time allowing Google limited access to to their headlines to act as a teaser to draw people in
Yeah, but that would mean drinking both Murdoch's and Jobs' cool-aid and becoming an iSlave, and no one is stupid enough to do that...oh wait, we're talking about Murdoch's minions here. Nevermind.
I used to think Declan McCullough was a reasonably intelligent fellow, but this is just a propaganda piece.
You really need to do a little background check on Mr. McCullough. Google his name in relation to LiViD (the earliest attempt at getting DVDs to play on Linux. He was single handedly responsible for getting the MPAA riled up against the free software world, and the legal troubles of several developers at that time.
They weren't the last free software developers that jerk shit on, by a long shot.
He is obviuosly still butt-buddies with one or more of the editors at slashdot since they still seem to give his appalling tripe preference over more intelligent and balanced news stories (I won't use the term 'reporting' for McCullough's form of yellow 'journalism')...must be some nice kickbacks in there for the slashdot people.
Honestly, I've been posting on this site for many years (as you can probably see by my relatively low /. id), but this love affair between /. and that particular piece of excrement makes me want to reconsider. Replacing links in submissions as happened with yesterday's "tabnapping" story just reinforces the notion that a better portal than slashdot is sorely needed, and soon. (No, I don't mean digg, much as I enjoy it at times)
It will never work out. The special effects explosions in action movies are hell on the furniture.
Worse still were the neighbors complaints after the snow scenes in Lord of the Rings when the Fellowship tried to cross the misty mountains before turning back and heading to Moria. Seems the melt required for the next scene seeped through the floorboards and flooded their flat (and the five floors beneath them). Oh well, still damn good entertainment.
You're absolutely correct that property rights play a huge role in American culture and thought. I wouldn't have thought very much of this until somebody pointed out to me that there are no trespassing laws in Scotland. None at all. ...and honestly, they get by just fine without them, as unfathomable as it was for my American mind to ponder.
It's similar in England (where I've lived for the past 3.5 years). You have the right of public access to farm fields, beaches, hills, you name it. So much so that farmers build and maintain gates and steps over fences to facilitate hikers crossing their fields. And you no what? It makes a much nicer, more enjoyable place to live than locales with big barbed wire fences and signs saying "No Tresspassing" or, even worse "Tresspassers will be Shot".
No, its google, so its cool to jump on their case for everything they do, legitimate or otherwise.
Hardly. When google pandered to China, although far less so than Microsoft and Yahoo, there was scathing criticism (and rightly so).
This, however, is a clear cut case of there being nothing to this at all, except a chance for governments with an interest in suppressing the free flow of information looking for a big club with which to threaten Google whenever Google helps disseminate information they don't want disseminated, or competes against a company that has lined the ruling politicians' pockets.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to see this as a prelude to the media cartels attacking google for allowing torrents to show up in search results, or some other anti-competative attack from some other quarter (Apple, Facebook ... could be any of a growing number of enemies Google is making as it gives away what so many others want to force us to buy), though it could well just be a typical government powergrab on an international scale.
You know, we wouldn't even have this problem if we didn't try to prohibit Americans from so many things...
We brought this on ourselves with our own rhetoric (not just right-wing religious crap that results in things like the war on drugs, legalized discrimination against gays, and a steady erosion in women's rights, but right-wing libertarian rhetoric about the supremacy of the market for solving all the world's ills and making businesses more powerful than democratically elected governments, and left-wing political correctness that had people fired for speaking controversially about certain topics).
Indeed, we wouldn't have this particular problem if people weren't propagating moronic notions of "property rights" trumping every other constitutional right, including that of free speech (and freedom of association). If freedom of speech applied, as it was intended, everywhere, for everyone, then you couldn't be fired for saying something stupid, be it to your colleagues, your flatmate, your co-workers (outside of business hours), or whoever, in whatever medium.
But we've lost track of that--now people, especially in the United States, promote the notion that "speech has consequences", which is true, but not the way they mean, and not like this. Getting fired for bad jokes is not a "natural consequence" of telling bad jokes any more than landing in prison for saying something the government (or a powerful business leader with friends in government) doesn't like. Both are an artifice to suppress speech and, in this particular case, an excuse to replace one person with seniority with someone else who is no doubt cheaper and more compliant. Scare people into compliance AND replace an experienced worker with a newbie who will work for peanuts: two birds, one stone.
Thanks to libertarian group-think, we are no longer citizens with constitutional freedoms and rights, we are merely peasants, living and eating at the sufferance of our corporate masters. And you know what? Most of us are too busy arguing vehemently for the rights of our masters to do whatever they want in the name of "it's their property, so no 'government' (read: constitutional) constraint should ever apply. Ridiculous, but the country is lousy with people who think exactly that, consequences be damned.
"Love is hate", "no is yes", "war is peace", and we live in a free society. Just so long as you don't actually try to exercize those freedoms against the wishes of your corporate master.
A reason that copyright extends past death is to discourage murder to get access to copyrighted material.
I'm sure that's the spin policymakers put on it when they deformed copyright law. A better approach to discouraging murder would be to have set copyright terms...which coincidentally, was what we used to have. It used to be you could tell if a work was in copyright or not by looking at the copyright notice, subtracting it from the current year, and seeing if the result was greater than the copyright term. If you want the equivalent of "life plus fifty years" to benefit the kids, make copyright equal to the median life span + 50 years, and make that the set term. If you want more innovation, reduce that back to something reasonable, like 20 years.
Making copyright life+50 to avoid a mass of murdered authors is bullshit...that problem goes away as soon as you decouple copyright from an author's demise, as was its original implementation (in the US at least...in the UK, the earliest forms of proto-copyright went on forever, and some works still fall in the category).
Well there goes my plans to smuggle porn into Australia and use it in a terrorist attack.
Gives 'blowjob' a whole new meaning...
If a company has a device that doesn't support tethering, why would you buy their products if you want to tether it? Why hype-up that they've "finally" included the damn thing, when it's been a standard feature on phones since GPRS and Bluetooth were available (my phone does it and that was released in 2003)?
NOOOO!!! Now you've done it! Asking a rhetorical questions founded on logic will bring Jobs' iSlaves out of the woodwork, screaming apologist tripe and nonsense defending the indefensible stance of their master and the crippled incapabilities of their jailed iPhones for the next 300 post. There goes the signal to noise ratio (and the neighborhood)...
What is the difference between hacking the Pentagon because you believe in aliens and hacking the Pentagon because you believe in Allah?
Everything.
While the mechanics of cracking system security may be the same, what you intend to do with the information you uncover, and your broader intentions against the US (if any) are very different.
In the case of Aliens, you're not exactly looking to fly planes into buildings, blow up cars in Times Square, or behead journalists. In the case of Allah, these intentions have already been demonstrated rather unequivocally in the real world, so extrapolating threats based on variations of past performance is not unreasonable, nor likely to yield broadly inaccurate predictions. Until flying-saucer nuts start threatening non-believers with death and mayhem, I'll tend to treat them as harmless eccentrics rather than potential terrorists, even when they cross the line and stupidly try to break into military computers.
There's absolutely no reason for the US to go after this guy--he's got a mental disorder, has already been severely chastened for his actions, is clearly not a threat to the US (or anyone else), and isn't likely to survive the so-called 'justice' America has in store for him.
Uhm... no, it's NOT possible. It's not possible for a CONSTANT to change ;) Then it wouldn't be a constant, and we could have to rename it.
Exactly. Understanding our universe would involve deterimine what causes universal constants (universal variables?) to change over time. Assuming the change is not completely random (in which case, understanding our universe would become a great deal more difficult-though not necessarily impossible), a function over time or relationship to some other changing characteristic of the universe should emerge.
And no, it's not going to be some stupid Heinleinian "god made things old to fuck with us" kind of thing ... it will just mean the universe is far more interesting and magnifiscent that we (and most especially, more than the creationists) ever imagined.
There's been a big push in recent years to move to "COTS" (Commercial Off The Shelf) solutions in the government - the military in particular. And while this may be find for things like holsters, backpacks, and office chairs, I think this highlights for EVERYONE, not just bright young aquisitions officers, that sometimes taking COTS technology and using it for your highly specific and critical application is not the best choice. Unfortunately, sometimes (sometimes!) big, expensive, and proprietary in-house solutions really are the best.
No, what it drives home is that, when you purchase a piece of hardware, it belongs to you, and no vendor should have the legal right to modify what you have purchased without your consent, nor to coerce consent for modifications that reduce or cripple the capabilities of something you have purchased.
Maybe now that military and commercial interests are being impacted, we can get the barest modicum of consumer protection to outlaw this shit (and similar, retroactive software modifications as well, such as Steve Jobs foists upon his hapless iPhone slaves ... it all eventually amounts to the same thing, and puts a lot more than the military at risk).
I know for our trading platforms we would never tolerate this kind of thing from a vendor (and Apple has lost out on this on more than one occasion for exactly this reason). I'm amazed the military hasn't come down on Sony like a ton of bricks -- a large investment bank certainly would have.
Except Europa. Attempt no landing there.
I think at this point, it would have to be...years of successfully controlling leaks, and then a prototype for the same product line gets leaked TWICE within weeks of each other? Yeah...I could believe the first one to be an honest mistake, but there is no way this one wasn't planned. /tinfoil hat
This time...maybe, as an attempt to turn lemons into lemonade with the last leak. But the fact that they sumarily fired the engineer who left the iPhone in the beergarden, and sent the swat team in after the reporters who reported it, indicates that at the very least, the first leak was unintential and that Steve Jobs only comment was something along the lines of "we are not amused."
Saying that you want to vote the bastards out of office is reasonable.
The Republicans and the Democrats do not follow the laws of this nation, period. They spend their days harassing 'we the people' with new laws and regulations. They do it for bribes, money, and power. Who gave them the right to break the laws and harass individuals?
Who gave you the right to be judge, jury, and executioner? If these people are breaking the law, they can be prosecuted and jailed. Unfortunatley, by and large they aren't. What they're doing is passing laws you don't like (and therefor take as 'personal harrassment'), and you don't like the motivation you assume (perhaps rightly) they have. Too bad. If they're breaking the law, prove it and have them prosecuted. If they're not, and you don't like what they're doing, then work to reform the law so that the campaign contributions (bribes) they're taking are no longer legal.
Saying that you want to see criminal prosecutions against those who you believe have acted illegally is reasonable.
Really? How reasonable is it when the judicial branch of our government doesn't even follow the laws?
What you mean is: they don't follow your specific, dogmatic, and fringe interpretation of the laws and constitution.
Threatening violence is not.
George Washington and friends didn't get rid of Big British Government by threatening legal action, writing petitions, and holding meetings. George Washington and friends got rid of Big British Government through the killing of thousands of British Government employees.
OK, nevermind, I'm wasting my time talking to a nutball.
You sir are a fucking menace to civilized people everywhere. Please stay the fuck out of my neighborhood. In fact, stay the fuck out of my state.