Not really. It's a sign that this "proactive" step generates less value than that money could generate when invested elsewhere (as the bank will do) even *after* the bank and the owners of the alternative investment have taken their cuts.
But, of course, even if the new film makes a mint for the studio via DVD sales, merch, and "ancillary income streams", none of that will count for suckers who agreed to take percentages of the net profit in their contracts.
I dunno. It's mostly ok but the way the tab strip works bugs me.
When maximised in Windows, there's a two or three pixel wide strip of title bar between the tabs and the top of the screen, so you don't get "mile-high tabs" like in Chrome. That's really annoying and the devs have done it deliberately - they seem to think that there needs to be grabbable title-bar across the entire width of the window, which I disagree with.
And, if you double click inside the tab region but not on a tab, it spawns a new tab (which is fine) but if you double click inside the 3-pixel-wide strip it does a window restore instead. Again, this is a reasonable decision - except that there is no visual difference between the narrow strip and the tab region.
All in all I'd say "needs to copy Chrome's title bar more". The title bar design in Chrome is one of my favourite things about it, despite (or perhaps because?) its utter non-compliance with the usual Windows HIG layout.
And although he did mention (a la the Mac), he didn't point out that OS-X *is* a certified Unix as well. So there's quite a few Unixes that you need to buy hardware for, apparently - although OS-X is by far the most widely available of those and the code is trivial to obtain, even if the vendor requires that it be installed only on their own hardware.
Terrorists haven't already won, because they largely DON'T CARE about "American freedom and apple pie". They want things like an absence of American bases and political influence in their home countries, and possibly the ability to enforce medieval moral and ethical codes on their countrymen and neighbours (ie Taliban-style Sharia) without Western interference.
Sadly, I suspect you're correct in your assessment of US Congress (and most other ruling bodies).
Still, it would have been nice if Google's settlement with the Author's Guild permitted bodies other than Google to get the same deal for creation of digital libraries of orphaned works.
The real problem is that this is a huge change to how copyright law has previously worked, and it's being implemented by private enterprise and a trade association and their associated lawyers without any actual involvement of an elected legislature or executive.
I'm all for the creation of a right to scan, archive, and make available orphaned works. I'm happy for Google to do the work and take whatever profit they can obtain from the market for orphaned works. (In fact, I think that if a copyright holder fails to make their copyrighted works available on Reasonable And Non Discriminatory terms, their copyright protection on those works should automatically cease. It should *never* be possible to use copyright to keep culture and knowledge away from public access). However, I think that right should be created by proper modification to copyright law, not by using class-action law to make an end run around the legislative system to create a monopoly on Google's behalf.
And, in the end, the deals with Big Content will *still* make the Apple product a million times more successful than the open community's version can achieve, even despite superior feature sets. This thing's not for doing work on; it's a media consumption device (web, streaming movies, streaming tv, ebooks). I suspect the best use of the App Store on this machine will be semi-portable gaming since the iPad doesn't have the in-pocket portability of the iPhones and iPod Touches. So yeah... if this thing succeeds at all, it'll be thanks to Apple's ability to get its customers to hand over money to Big Content via iTunes, and the associated love that Big Content has for Apple.
Compile it with every C compiler you can get your hands on. Feed your compiler's source code into the compiler executables that you built using every available C compiler on the market, and then compare the second-generation binaries of your own compiler. While I would expect the first generation compiler binaries to be different (since they were made with different third-party compilers), assuming that your compilation code works in a predictable fashion, shouldn't all the self-compiled second generation binaries be identical? If they aren't, then you can tell which of the first-generation binaries is/are compromised. Unless, of course, all the second-generation binaries are different, or they're all compromised in an identical fashion, in which case you're FUBAR'd.
I guess you could take the same strategy to try and verify the hardware as well?
What's really annoying is when webpages do stupid tricks so that even when you've set.pdf to always open in an external app (eg Adobe Reader, Foxit Reader) it *still* opens as an embedded object in the browser. That irritates me so much.
Out of that 2 billion Linux machines, how many are used as interactive user workstations (ie desktop & notebook clients)?
It matters.
Servers are usually administered by someone who knows something about what they're doing. Consumer appliances are often not administered at all - but that's fine, because their software loadout comes with everything they will ever need and any updates come as a "whole system software replacement" from the manufacturer. An appliance's small functional set compared to a general purpose PC means that they have extremely small attack surfaces, which also reduces their vulnerability.
Neither of them are in a situation where their owners are going to easily expose the system to the two primary infection vectors for malware: hostile sites on the internet that exploit browser vulnerabilities, and trojans that are executed at the request of the ill-informed user because they thought they were going to get something they wanted or needed. Linux and OS-X have no special protection against these vectors compared to Windows, as the pwn-to-own contest regularly demonstrates.
When was the last time there was a major Windows worm that can replicate over an internet connection unaided? A quick google for "new Windows worm" all seem to be about Conficker, and mostly date back to late 2008/early 2009. Even at the time of these reports, it was known that Conficker required a vulnerability to be present for which patches were already available and had been distributed to any competently-run machine. Conficker's been pretty successful, but according to Wikipedia it has three infection vectors: the now long-since-closed vulnerability that was patched in October 2008, dictionary attacks against weak admin passwords (hard to blame _that_ on the software vendor) and user-assisted installs via USB drives which Conficker sets up with misleading autorun dialogs. (Aside: autorun has got to be one of the worst security ideas ever. Thanks, Microsoft). It's not like Linux hasn't had _any_ exploitable remote security flaws in the same time frame. Debian version of OpenSSL, for instance?
The simple fact is: desktop systems are profitable to pwn, Windows machines are the largest juiciest bunch of grapes on the vine, and systems that interact with the clueless on a regular basis are the lowest hanging fruit of all. Economically, Linux (and to a lesser degree Mac) malware is impossible to justify the return on investment, and believe me, malware these days is all about the ROI. The bad guys do love a nice pwnable Linux webserver though, thanks to their valuable clean IPs and good internet connections, so they scoop them up when they can - but there aren't enough of those around to justify the kind of R&D that goes into their Windows client pwnership tools. But despite their rarity, vulnerable Linux webservers can, and *do*, get pwned on a regular basis because they're valuable. It just doesn't usually make it to the mainstream press when it happens like the latest variant of Windows Herpes - because the set of people who care about the impact of a security flaw on badly-administered Linux servers is negligible compared to the boundless masses of people who use Windows computers every day at work and at home.
Oh, I think Microsoft will take responsibility - my personal bet is that the service isn't going to come back online, and someone is going to cop an absolute reaming within Microsoft (probably someone at MS China). The real question is whether MS will attempt to settle with Plurk to head off a lawsuit - I'd say they've probably got one justifiably incoming. Because MS takes such a strong anti-infringement position, they're not going to be able to just shrug this off.
Yes, indeed. Which is why it's so annoying that there are hardly any PC games that support multiplayer on one system any more. Especially considering how many games on the PC are console ports that *do* support single-system multiplayer on their home systems!
Yeah, I think the policy is probably supposed to prevent other passengers in the queue from deriving entertainment from the contents of other passenger's luggage (gee, check out the 12" dildo and handcuffs in that businessman's briefcase!)
Guess they wouldn't want to be sued for revealing someone's dirty-but-legal secrets....
BGG's game ranking charts are quite influential in the board-gaming world. A lot of local hobby stores have them up on the wall as a quick guide to some excellent games. Until quite recently, Games Workshop's new edition of Space Hulk was in the top ten games. It's now dropped to number 170.
Well, I guess that's what happens when you value greed more than public relations or your fan base (although BGG isn't really oriented towards GW's bread-and-butter of miniatures wargaming).
Eclipse Phase is under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence. It's also pretty awesome; I bought a nice hardcover, full colour well bound copy. Beats pdf any day, although it's not cheap.
Ironbridge looks like a very interesting place to visit if you can spare the time outside London. Lots of early Industrial Revolution relics. Speaking as an Australian, there's no part of England that's too far away from London to visit - but your mileage may vary!
As I understand, ACTA is being negotiated directly between representatives of the various countries. The UN, as an entity, is not involved, although obviously the states involved in ACTA are all member states of the UN as well.
let them wear jackets with sponsor patches ala Nascar
Let them? How about require them to!
That's actually a very insightful approach to data visualisation of campaign contributions. If prominence and size of a contributor's logo was tied to the amount of money they'd contributed in the same way as it is for sports teams & racing, voters would be able to intuitively figure out the major influences on the politician, by analogy with their familiarity with the world of professional sports.
Realistically, it'll never happen, because politicians want to be seen as holding to an ideology rather than being beholden to vested interests. But a nice photoshop based around the concept would be an excellent piece of art for a third party to create during a campaign, as a way of both criticizing the lobbyist system and simultaneously educating the public.
In Australia, vote counting is a public process which can be attended by anyone (I think). In practice, the major parties send scrutineers, and I imagine independents tend to keep an eye on things as well. Mutual suspicion, a spread of power amongst interested parties so that no-one can dominate the proceedings, and a panopticon process are the best way to handle such things.
Of course, we use old school paper voting. We have two systems: instant run-off preferential voting for House of Representatives (equivalent to the British House of Commons) electorates, and a much more complicated preferential system for the Senate electorates. Our Senate is like the American Senate except that it strictly serves as a review board for legislation, and Australian senators are much less powerful than American senators. That's the federal system; state parliaments are similar, but some have dispensed with the upper house entirely.
Funnily enough, despite the fact that we have far more complex vote counting systems than Americans (first past the post is beyond sucky), we get results the night of the election without needing to resort to black box electrickery.
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Not really. It's a sign that this "proactive" step generates less value than that money could generate when invested elsewhere (as the bank will do) even *after* the bank and the owners of the alternative investment have taken their cuts.
But, of course, even if the new film makes a mint for the studio via DVD sales, merch, and "ancillary income streams", none of that will count for suckers who agreed to take percentages of the net profit in their contracts.
I dunno. It's mostly ok but the way the tab strip works bugs me.
When maximised in Windows, there's a two or three pixel wide strip of title bar between the tabs and the top of the screen, so you don't get "mile-high tabs" like in Chrome. That's really annoying and the devs have done it deliberately - they seem to think that there needs to be grabbable title-bar across the entire width of the window, which I disagree with.
And, if you double click inside the tab region but not on a tab, it spawns a new tab (which is fine) but if you double click inside the 3-pixel-wide strip it does a window restore instead. Again, this is a reasonable decision - except that there is no visual difference between the narrow strip and the tab region.
All in all I'd say "needs to copy Chrome's title bar more". The title bar design in Chrome is one of my favourite things about it, despite (or perhaps because?) its utter non-compliance with the usual Windows HIG layout.
And although he did mention (a la the Mac), he didn't point out that OS-X *is* a certified Unix as well. So there's quite a few Unixes that you need to buy hardware for, apparently - although OS-X is by far the most widely available of those and the code is trivial to obtain, even if the vendor requires that it be installed only on their own hardware.
Terrorists haven't already won, because they largely DON'T CARE about "American freedom and apple pie". They want things like an absence of American bases and political influence in their home countries, and possibly the ability to enforce medieval moral and ethical codes on their countrymen and neighbours (ie Taliban-style Sharia) without Western interference.
Terrorists haven't won. America has lost.
Which book?
Sadly, I suspect you're correct in your assessment of US Congress (and most other ruling bodies).
Still, it would have been nice if Google's settlement with the Author's Guild permitted bodies other than Google to get the same deal for creation of digital libraries of orphaned works.
The real problem is that this is a huge change to how copyright law has previously worked, and it's being implemented by private enterprise and a trade association and their associated lawyers without any actual involvement of an elected legislature or executive.
I'm all for the creation of a right to scan, archive, and make available orphaned works. I'm happy for Google to do the work and take whatever profit they can obtain from the market for orphaned works. (In fact, I think that if a copyright holder fails to make their copyrighted works available on Reasonable And Non Discriminatory terms, their copyright protection on those works should automatically cease. It should *never* be possible to use copyright to keep culture and knowledge away from public access). However, I think that right should be created by proper modification to copyright law, not by using class-action law to make an end run around the legislative system to create a monopoly on Google's behalf.
Well, looks like you'd be in a position to know, Archangel Michael. :)
And, in the end, the deals with Big Content will *still* make the Apple product a million times more successful than the open community's version can achieve, even despite superior feature sets. This thing's not for doing work on; it's a media consumption device (web, streaming movies, streaming tv, ebooks). I suspect the best use of the App Store on this machine will be semi-portable gaming since the iPad doesn't have the in-pocket portability of the iPhones and iPod Touches. So yeah... if this thing succeeds at all, it'll be thanks to Apple's ability to get its customers to hand over money to Big Content via iTunes, and the associated love that Big Content has for Apple.
Compile it with every C compiler you can get your hands on. Feed your compiler's source code into the compiler executables that you built using every available C compiler on the market, and then compare the second-generation binaries of your own compiler. While I would expect the first generation compiler binaries to be different (since they were made with different third-party compilers), assuming that your compilation code works in a predictable fashion, shouldn't all the self-compiled second generation binaries be identical? If they aren't, then you can tell which of the first-generation binaries is/are compromised. Unless, of course, all the second-generation binaries are different, or they're all compromised in an identical fashion, in which case you're FUBAR'd.
I guess you could take the same strategy to try and verify the hardware as well?
What's really annoying is when webpages do stupid tricks so that even when you've set .pdf to always open in an external app (eg Adobe Reader, Foxit Reader) it *still* opens as an embedded object in the browser. That irritates me so much.
Out of that 2 billion Linux machines, how many are used as interactive user workstations (ie desktop & notebook clients)?
It matters.
Servers are usually administered by someone who knows something about what they're doing. Consumer appliances are often not administered at all - but that's fine, because their software loadout comes with everything they will ever need and any updates come as a "whole system software replacement" from the manufacturer. An appliance's small functional set compared to a general purpose PC means that they have extremely small attack surfaces, which also reduces their vulnerability.
Neither of them are in a situation where their owners are going to easily expose the system to the two primary infection vectors for malware: hostile sites on the internet that exploit browser vulnerabilities, and trojans that are executed at the request of the ill-informed user because they thought they were going to get something they wanted or needed. Linux and OS-X have no special protection against these vectors compared to Windows, as the pwn-to-own contest regularly demonstrates.
When was the last time there was a major Windows worm that can replicate over an internet connection unaided? A quick google for "new Windows worm" all seem to be about Conficker, and mostly date back to late 2008/early 2009. Even at the time of these reports, it was known that Conficker required a vulnerability to be present for which patches were already available and had been distributed to any competently-run machine. Conficker's been pretty successful, but according to Wikipedia it has three infection vectors: the now long-since-closed vulnerability that was patched in October 2008, dictionary attacks against weak admin passwords (hard to blame _that_ on the software vendor) and user-assisted installs via USB drives which Conficker sets up with misleading autorun dialogs. (Aside: autorun has got to be one of the worst security ideas ever. Thanks, Microsoft). It's not like Linux hasn't had _any_ exploitable remote security flaws in the same time frame. Debian version of OpenSSL, for instance?
The simple fact is: desktop systems are profitable to pwn, Windows machines are the largest juiciest bunch of grapes on the vine, and systems that interact with the clueless on a regular basis are the lowest hanging fruit of all. Economically, Linux (and to a lesser degree Mac) malware is impossible to justify the return on investment, and believe me, malware these days is all about the ROI. The bad guys do love a nice pwnable Linux webserver though, thanks to their valuable clean IPs and good internet connections, so they scoop them up when they can - but there aren't enough of those around to justify the kind of R&D that goes into their Windows client pwnership tools. But despite their rarity, vulnerable Linux webservers can, and *do*, get pwned on a regular basis because they're valuable. It just doesn't usually make it to the mainstream press when it happens like the latest variant of Windows Herpes - because the set of people who care about the impact of a security flaw on badly-administered Linux servers is negligible compared to the boundless masses of people who use Windows computers every day at work and at home.
Doesn't shotgun propellant contain its own oxidiser?
Oh, I think Microsoft will take responsibility - my personal bet is that the service isn't going to come back online, and someone is going to cop an absolute reaming within Microsoft (probably someone at MS China). The real question is whether MS will attempt to settle with Plurk to head off a lawsuit - I'd say they've probably got one justifiably incoming. Because MS takes such a strong anti-infringement position, they're not going to be able to just shrug this off.
Yes, indeed. Which is why it's so annoying that there are hardly any PC games that support multiplayer on one system any more. Especially considering how many games on the PC are console ports that *do* support single-system multiplayer on their home systems!
Yeah, I think the policy is probably supposed to prevent other passengers in the queue from deriving entertainment from the contents of other passenger's luggage (gee, check out the 12" dildo and handcuffs in that businessman's briefcase!)
Guess they wouldn't want to be sued for revealing someone's dirty-but-legal secrets....
You're thinking of Wizards of the Coast, publishers of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering.
BGG's game ranking charts are quite influential in the board-gaming world. A lot of local hobby stores have them up on the wall as a quick guide to some excellent games. Until quite recently, Games Workshop's new edition of Space Hulk was in the top ten games. It's now dropped to number 170.
Well, I guess that's what happens when you value greed more than public relations or your fan base (although BGG isn't really oriented towards GW's bread-and-butter of miniatures wargaming).
Eclipse Phase is under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence. It's also pretty awesome; I bought a nice hardcover, full colour well bound copy. Beats pdf any day, although it's not cheap.
Ironbridge looks like a very interesting place to visit if you can spare the time outside London. Lots of early Industrial Revolution relics. Speaking as an Australian, there's no part of England that's too far away from London to visit - but your mileage may vary!
As I understand, ACTA is being negotiated directly between representatives of the various countries. The UN, as an entity, is not involved, although obviously the states involved in ACTA are all member states of the UN as well.
let them wear jackets with sponsor patches ala Nascar
Let them? How about require them to!
That's actually a very insightful approach to data visualisation of campaign contributions. If prominence and size of a contributor's logo was tied to the amount of money they'd contributed in the same way as it is for sports teams & racing, voters would be able to intuitively figure out the major influences on the politician, by analogy with their familiarity with the world of professional sports.
Realistically, it'll never happen, because politicians want to be seen as holding to an ideology rather than being beholden to vested interests. But a nice photoshop based around the concept would be an excellent piece of art for a third party to create during a campaign, as a way of both criticizing the lobbyist system and simultaneously educating the public.
Yeah, but I find it doesn't work too well with multi-user simultaneous access, and the sync features are positively primitive.
In Australia, vote counting is a public process which can be attended by anyone (I think). In practice, the major parties send scrutineers, and I imagine independents tend to keep an eye on things as well. Mutual suspicion, a spread of power amongst interested parties so that no-one can dominate the proceedings, and a panopticon process are the best way to handle such things.
Of course, we use old school paper voting. We have two systems: instant run-off preferential voting for House of Representatives (equivalent to the British House of Commons) electorates, and a much more complicated preferential system for the Senate electorates. Our Senate is like the American Senate except that it strictly serves as a review board for legislation, and Australian senators are much less powerful than American senators. That's the federal system; state parliaments are similar, but some have dispensed with the upper house entirely.
Funnily enough, despite the fact that we have far more complex vote counting systems than Americans (first past the post is beyond sucky), we get results the night of the election without needing to resort to black box electrickery.