If you think Obama, or any member of the democratic party for that matter, is not completely bought and sold to corporate interests, you're a fool. The difference between Republicans and Democrats? There isn't one. Those with a lot of money simply shift where their campaign donations go from election season to election season. Republicans invade countries to fight terrorism, Democrats invade to liberate the oppressed. Does it really matter what the excuse is when the result is the same? If you're voting Democrat or Republican during the next election, YOU are the problem... Not Obama or Romney.
And that's EXACTLY what someone should do. This shit isn't going to end until the general public feels the burn. We'd be all better off if that burn were a prank and not what we're really afraid will happen...
There are the backdoors you know about, and then there's the backdoors you don't. The concern isn't really china eavesdropping. The fact of the matter is, they've got the talent to just hack their way in with or without a backdoor. The concern is that China is producing a large percentage of the networking equipment in the world right now, and it would be very easy for them to introduce something far smaller, and far more dangerous. For example, a kill switch. They broadcast some per-determined signal or something and 90% of the routers outside of short their power supplies across a resistor, spiking their power usage all at once world wide causing blackouts and frying all of the equipment. The utility of that isn't all that great but it would be devastating during a war and nearly impossible to detect in their code. The possibilities are endless.
A private, for-profit company would never invest in such things and anything of the sort that would arise would be the result of a bug or something forced on them by federal regulation. Either way, whatever it was that compromised the equipment would be an accident and far less dangerous. When the company is funded and run by the state... and their motives are governed by ideology rather than profit, you can never truly know what the equipment is capable of. You could literally be installing a bomb in your rack and not even know it.
The media industry has time... in fact, they've had a LOT of time... to get a handle on this situation. People want what they want... and people are lazy. People will pay money for something that's easier. People will even break the law if that makes their lives easier. So, as the media industry enacts more and more laws to try prevent piracy, they are completely missing the point... their real mistake is that they are making it harder and harder to get their content, so more people turn to piracy.
The technology surrounding piracy is in its infancy. It's crude, difficult for the average person to use, difficult to find the content you want. This situation will not last. What the media industry needs to do is make the legal method easier than the illegal method. People will flock to it, and piracy will fade. But that's not what they are doing. They see the "Drive to walmart, buy the movie, drive home, watch it... wait 6 months, the extended cut version is released, another trip to walmart... etc..." as more profitable. And it is, if people were willing to put up with it. But they're not. They need to partner with Netflix and be done with it. They need to push ISPs to also partner with Netflix. If they focused their legal fight on net neutrality so ISPs would be forced to properly maintain their networks, and created partnerships with netflix that allowed them to have a more profitable relationship with them, they could ensure their survival.
He's right for one reason... If you have a problem on a Mac... well you're not likely to have a problem on a mac... then again, you're stuck with what they allow you and your computer cost twice what an equivalent PC would. If you have a problem on a windows machine, it may take you a few minutes to a few hours to figure out. If you have problems in Linux? Oh fuck... And getting help from the community? Good luck there. I like linux, but someone needs to come up with a standardized distro for gaming, and have good support for the community. What I'm really hoping Valve is really doing is coming out with their own distro for gaming. With all the drivers, codecs, whatever else you need.
Finally! Apple invented a true physical keyboard to attach to iPads... Now watch the rest of the world try and catch up by coming up with their own, lame, copycat keyboards so they can cash in. Once again, Apple invents something totally new and the world marvels.
Just like all media, the internet will kill it. Video is just the largest in file size, and therefor last to fall because of how long it takes to download. Remember when you had to buy an entire album just to get 1 song?
They are trying to beef up video with 3D, but networking speeds are quickly outpacing their ability to come up with things that use large amounts of bandwidth to transmit. Just like all other media, the internet is doom for the Movie, TV and cable industry. We, of course, want to see this happen asap... but sadly the evolution of these things is not so quick. Our children will enjoy a much lower budget video industry, but there will be much much more variety. Think of what the internet is doing/has done for music. You can find almost anything you can think of now. The albums may not have full backing orchestras like the super bands of the 80s, but that's ok. I'll trade quality of concept for quality of recording any day.
You should always have a pre-1985 computer laying around somewhere to show your kids. Computers have turned into magic, indecipherable boxes. The first home-computers were great, precisely because they were so god-damned slow. They were so slow, you could actually watch them run and understand what was happening.
The content proviers force the cable/satalite/phone companies to force packages on their customers. For example, if you want AMC... you have to get all of the channels that they force you to take along with it. AMC will not allow you to get AMC without also getting IFC, WE tv, Sundance Channel, and IFC Films. Why do they force these companies to carry these other channels? Becuase the content on those channels is very very cheap... But they are full of commercial revenue. AMC itself has all of their hit shows, which are expensive.
Because the majority of content providers follow this same format, we now have hundreds of channels, most of which are airing total crap... or decades old reruns. Sprinkled inbetween these channels are the core channels that people really want to watch. Unfortunately you have no choice in your lineup, and because the content providers force everyone to sign the same contracts, you don't have any choice in what you get to watch.
Sick of it all, everyone's turning to Netflix or outright piracy.
Same shit, new words: From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism Marx believed that the capitalist bourgeois and their economists were promoting what he saw as the lie that "The interests of the capitalist and those of the worker are... one and the same"; he believed that they did this by purporting the concept that "the fastest possible growth of productive capital" was best not only for the wealthy capitalists but also for the workers because it provided them with employment.
Bourgeoisie: those who "own the means of production" (you're new non-marxist sounding word would be Corporation)
If you're going to argue Marxist principles, at least have a clue what you're arguing.
Gun control laws do not apply. People have, for years, machined firearms in their basements and garages. I've done so myself. It's completely legal to experiment and build your own stuff. There are gun control laws that govern the sale and purchase of firearms and those would not apply to creating your own. Now, if you built a full auto, that's a bit different. Because owning that weapon requires a permit. But, before anyone starts freaking out that you could "print" the parts to make a full auto... Making a pipe bomb has been as been as simple as buying an iron pipe, 2 end caps and some smokeless powder since the dawn of this country. It's far easier to make, far deadlier, and will remain so. We can't legislate that fact away... ever... For example, we're lucky the dude in Colorado took in an assault rifle rather than a half dozen pipe bombs... I doubt anyone would have walked out of there if he had.
Any book that doesn't involve a Bearenstine bear is hard to contain in a 2hr movie. The fact that we're so used to directors making shrunken heads out of some of the best literary works and think that's acceptable is a sad thing. The Hobbit has 19 chapters, and I could easily see a movie taking an average of 30min each getting through them in detail. So that's 10hrs of material, easily.
If anything, the Lord of the Rings movies cut HUGE gaping swaths out of that story. Remember Tom Bombadil? He was one of the most identifiable characters in those books and was replaced in the movie with about a 20second sequence where strider just hands the hobbits a bunch of magic swords. It's a sad thing. Would people have tolerated it being broken up into 10 or more movies? No... but it's success is what's allowing Jackson to expand on the Hobbit. Which is a good thing, because, in my not so humble opinion, The Hobbit is one of the best printed works in human history. I'm glad they are doing this. The only thing that would make me more happy would be a big budget "Band of Brothers" style series. If we're lucky, maybe that's what they'll do with the Silmarillion.
Never? Windows 8 will run on a 10yr old computer. It might not run the best... but it'll run. Linux will run on just about anything as long as you get the correct drivers for it. Maybe you'll need to use an older GUI... or none at all... but it'll run.
Apple is the poster child for locked in environments, less user choice, aggressive tactics to get users to upgrade as often and as frequently as possible... etc...
Because Apple profits off of both the OS and the hardware, they have a very strong incentive to make new OS's require new hardware... as well has New hardware that requires new OSs.
This is what apple does. They create a market. They hype it to the point that they have a rabid consumer base that has no clue what's really going on. Then they change the rules and jack up the price to rake in the profit. Is there really any reason anyone would ever chose an apple device based on its technical merits?
The problem with Biometric vaults is that they are HARD to open. If your palm or finger is just a bit off, it doesn't work. So, you have a burger come in your house, and you're fumbling around in the dark with sweaty palms trying to get this thing open... fail
The cheaper the safe, the worse they are. My understanding is that for one to be relighable enough to be worth your life, you're going to be spending at least $400
The best option is a safe with a digital keypad that bolts to the floor. You can open it in seconds without fail.
As a gun owner and a father of a 4 year old, I have to plead that if you're going to own a gun, you MUST properly train your children, no matter how young, in Gun Safety. If you are not going to, or you do not trust your child to do what they are trained to do, do not keep a gun in the house. Period. Gun safety is the only way to keep your kid safe. A vault is there to keep out buglers, not children with indefinite amounts of time on their hands. What's the proper training for someone that's 3? If you see a gun, ANYWHERE, tell an adult immediately. Every time they see one and tell you, you give them a treat. Basically, every time my kid sees a cop he gets an M&M. It gets irritating, but that's the price you pay.
As far as the safe goes? It's supposed to be bolted to a concrete floor you morons. You've got a loaded gun, in a safe that's not bolted down, you're really lucky the gun didn't just go off INSIDE the damned safe while the kids were bumping it around. And no, the safe probably wouldn't stop the round. Read the directions next time.
Boot to a windows repair disc from Windows Vista or newer Go to command prompt format c:/fs:NTFS/p:2 replace c: with whichever drives you want to sink Writes all 0s to the drive twice. Call up your It department and tell them you got a bluescreen and now it wont boot make sure not to leave the repair disc in the drive.
Data is still recoverable if the NSA is after you or something but I doubt you care about that level of security.
I guess hackers are ruined... no ones ever been able to software replicate a security dongle. If they had, there'd be copies of professional audio/video/photo editing software all over the pirate bay! Oh wait...
Having worked in a NOC before, I can tell you that it's not free at any point. Things break... a lot. Fiber makes things a lot more reliable. But they still break. What happens when a fire truck knocks down your fiber trunk? You're going to charge the City $500k for the repair? So then they have to lay off a few firemen... and now you have a public relations nightmare? No way... so you just suck it up and pay for it yourself.
You know how many Fiber trunks we lost because some un-insured drunk drove their car into a pole, the car caught fire and torched the pole, the fiber and the power line? You think they had insurance? Or even if they did, that they had enough to cover that kind of bill?
I applaud Googles attempt here, but they can't charge nothing, it's just not going to work.
And that's the problem with laws that make certain objects/substances illegal. Eventually someone will find a way of obtaining, growing, creating these objects so easily that the law becomes a joke. Now the objects themselves may be dangerous, but because the public has been sheltered from their existence for a period of time, they are left woefully unprepared for when they come flooding into the hands of criminals overnight.
If everyone in that theater was armed and had at least rudimentary firearms safety training... how far do you think the crazy guy would have gotten?
Well, they had a bigger budget then. Congress is not willing to invest hard earned tax dollars into faking landings on mars and such, when we'd not have any communists to make look like asses while we were doing it.
How many kids were KILLED in car accidents in the same period of time? I think the benevolent Consumer Product Safety Commission should issue a stop-sale on automobiles immediately. It's the only safe thing to do.
Well, in a lot of cases I'd agree with you. For example, if he hosted some content on his Russian site that's illegal here and then someone here downloaded it... our current justice department seems to think that's fair game and would go after him. That's obviously an overreach of our government. Same with wikileaks.
But in this case, this man alegedly used a computer network to attack, or hack, sites in the US. I'd liken it to someone using a remote controlled robotic arm to stab you. Even though they are in Russia, the robotic knife attack happens in the US. I'd say that's fair game for extradition. I think that, where things could get sketchy is where the user doesn't actually know which country the servers he's accessing are hosted. So you're in a country where online gambling is legal, and you go to some gambling site... only to later find out that it was hosted in the US and the US federal government is trying to extradite you for using the site...
Slashdot Mirror
If you think Obama, or any member of the democratic party for that matter, is not completely bought and sold to corporate interests, you're a fool. The difference between Republicans and Democrats? There isn't one. Those with a lot of money simply shift where their campaign donations go from election season to election season. Republicans invade countries to fight terrorism, Democrats invade to liberate the oppressed. Does it really matter what the excuse is when the result is the same? If you're voting Democrat or Republican during the next election, YOU are the problem... Not Obama or Romney.
And that's EXACTLY what someone should do. This shit isn't going to end until the general public feels the burn. We'd be all better off if that burn were a prank and not what we're really afraid will happen...
There are the backdoors you know about, and then there's the backdoors you don't. The concern isn't really china eavesdropping. The fact of the matter is, they've got the talent to just hack their way in with or without a backdoor. The concern is that China is producing a large percentage of the networking equipment in the world right now, and it would be very easy for them to introduce something far smaller, and far more dangerous. For example, a kill switch. They broadcast some per-determined signal or something and 90% of the routers outside of short their power supplies across a resistor, spiking their power usage all at once world wide causing blackouts and frying all of the equipment. The utility of that isn't all that great but it would be devastating during a war and nearly impossible to detect in their code. The possibilities are endless.
A private, for-profit company would never invest in such things and anything of the sort that would arise would be the result of a bug or something forced on them by federal regulation. Either way, whatever it was that compromised the equipment would be an accident and far less dangerous. When the company is funded and run by the state... and their motives are governed by ideology rather than profit, you can never truly know what the equipment is capable of. You could literally be installing a bomb in your rack and not even know it.
The media industry has time... in fact, they've had a LOT of time... to get a handle on this situation. People want what they want... and people are lazy. People will pay money for something that's easier. People will even break the law if that makes their lives easier. So, as the media industry enacts more and more laws to try prevent piracy, they are completely missing the point... their real mistake is that they are making it harder and harder to get their content, so more people turn to piracy.
The technology surrounding piracy is in its infancy. It's crude, difficult for the average person to use, difficult to find the content you want. This situation will not last. What the media industry needs to do is make the legal method easier than the illegal method. People will flock to it, and piracy will fade. But that's not what they are doing. They see the "Drive to walmart, buy the movie, drive home, watch it... wait 6 months, the extended cut version is released, another trip to walmart... etc..." as more profitable. And it is, if people were willing to put up with it. But they're not. They need to partner with Netflix and be done with it. They need to push ISPs to also partner with Netflix. If they focused their legal fight on net neutrality so ISPs would be forced to properly maintain their networks, and created partnerships with netflix that allowed them to have a more profitable relationship with them, they could ensure their survival.
He's right for one reason... If you have a problem on a Mac... well you're not likely to have a problem on a mac... then again, you're stuck with what they allow you and your computer cost twice what an equivalent PC would. If you have a problem on a windows machine, it may take you a few minutes to a few hours to figure out. If you have problems in Linux? Oh fuck... And getting help from the community? Good luck there. I like linux, but someone needs to come up with a standardized distro for gaming, and have good support for the community. What I'm really hoping Valve is really doing is coming out with their own distro for gaming. With all the drivers, codecs, whatever else you need.
Finally! Apple invented a true physical keyboard to attach to iPads... Now watch the rest of the world try and catch up by coming up with their own, lame, copycat keyboards so they can cash in. Once again, Apple invents something totally new and the world marvels.
Just like all media, the internet will kill it. Video is just the largest in file size, and therefor last to fall because of how long it takes to download. Remember when you had to buy an entire album just to get 1 song?
They are trying to beef up video with 3D, but networking speeds are quickly outpacing their ability to come up with things that use large amounts of bandwidth to transmit. Just like all other media, the internet is doom for the Movie, TV and cable industry. We, of course, want to see this happen asap... but sadly the evolution of these things is not so quick. Our children will enjoy a much lower budget video industry, but there will be much much more variety. Think of what the internet is doing/has done for music. You can find almost anything you can think of now. The albums may not have full backing orchestras like the super bands of the 80s, but that's ok. I'll trade quality of concept for quality of recording any day.
You should always have a pre-1985 computer laying around somewhere to show your kids. Computers have turned into magic, indecipherable boxes. The first home-computers were great, precisely because they were so god-damned slow. They were so slow, you could actually watch them run and understand what was happening.
The content proviers force the cable/satalite/phone companies to force packages on their customers. For example, if you want AMC... you have to get all of the channels that they force you to take along with it. AMC will not allow you to get AMC without also getting IFC, WE tv, Sundance Channel, and IFC Films. Why do they force these companies to carry these other channels? Becuase the content on those channels is very very cheap... But they are full of commercial revenue. AMC itself has all of their hit shows, which are expensive.
Because the majority of content providers follow this same format, we now have hundreds of channels, most of which are airing total crap... or decades old reruns. Sprinkled inbetween these channels are the core channels that people really want to watch. Unfortunately you have no choice in your lineup, and because the content providers force everyone to sign the same contracts, you don't have any choice in what you get to watch.
Sick of it all, everyone's turning to Netflix or outright piracy.
Same shit, new words:
From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism
Marx believed that the capitalist bourgeois and their economists were promoting what he saw as the lie that "The interests of the capitalist and those of the worker are... one and the same"; he believed that they did this by purporting the concept that "the fastest possible growth of productive capital" was best not only for the wealthy capitalists but also for the workers because it provided them with employment.
Bourgeoisie: those who "own the means of production" (you're new non-marxist sounding word would be Corporation)
If you're going to argue Marxist principles, at least have a clue what you're arguing.
Gun control laws do not apply. People have, for years, machined firearms in their basements and garages. I've done so myself. It's completely legal to experiment and build your own stuff. There are gun control laws that govern the sale and purchase of firearms and those would not apply to creating your own. Now, if you built a full auto, that's a bit different. Because owning that weapon requires a permit. But, before anyone starts freaking out that you could "print" the parts to make a full auto... Making a pipe bomb has been as been as simple as buying an iron pipe, 2 end caps and some smokeless powder since the dawn of this country. It's far easier to make, far deadlier, and will remain so. We can't legislate that fact away... ever... For example, we're lucky the dude in Colorado took in an assault rifle rather than a half dozen pipe bombs... I doubt anyone would have walked out of there if he had.
Any book that doesn't involve a Bearenstine bear is hard to contain in a 2hr movie. The fact that we're so used to directors making shrunken heads out of some of the best literary works and think that's acceptable is a sad thing. The Hobbit has 19 chapters, and I could easily see a movie taking an average of 30min each getting through them in detail. So that's 10hrs of material, easily.
If anything, the Lord of the Rings movies cut HUGE gaping swaths out of that story. Remember Tom Bombadil? He was one of the most identifiable characters in those books and was replaced in the movie with about a 20second sequence where strider just hands the hobbits a bunch of magic swords. It's a sad thing. Would people have tolerated it being broken up into 10 or more movies? No... but it's success is what's allowing Jackson to expand on the Hobbit. Which is a good thing, because, in my not so humble opinion, The Hobbit is one of the best printed works in human history. I'm glad they are doing this. The only thing that would make me more happy would be a big budget "Band of Brothers" style series. If we're lucky, maybe that's what they'll do with the Silmarillion.
Never? Windows 8 will run on a 10yr old computer. It might not run the best... but it'll run. Linux will run on just about anything as long as you get the correct drivers for it. Maybe you'll need to use an older GUI... or none at all... but it'll run.
Apple is the poster child for locked in environments, less user choice, aggressive tactics to get users to upgrade as often and as frequently as possible... etc...
Because Apple profits off of both the OS and the hardware, they have a very strong incentive to make new OS's require new hardware... as well has New hardware that requires new OSs.
For those that don't remember the 80s...
This is what apple does. They create a market. They hype it to the point that they have a rabid consumer base that has no clue what's really going on. Then they change the rules and jack up the price to rake in the profit. Is there really any reason anyone would ever chose an apple device based on its technical merits?
The problem with Biometric vaults is that they are HARD to open. If your palm or finger is just a bit off, it doesn't work. So, you have a burger come in your house, and you're fumbling around in the dark with sweaty palms trying to get this thing open... fail
The cheaper the safe, the worse they are. My understanding is that for one to be relighable enough to be worth your life, you're going to be spending at least $400
The best option is a safe with a digital keypad that bolts to the floor. You can open it in seconds without fail.
A safe is completely useless if it's not bolted to the floor. But nothing is a replacement for proper parenting.
As a gun owner and a father of a 4 year old, I have to plead that if you're going to own a gun, you MUST properly train your children, no matter how young, in Gun Safety. If you are not going to, or you do not trust your child to do what they are trained to do, do not keep a gun in the house. Period. Gun safety is the only way to keep your kid safe. A vault is there to keep out buglers, not children with indefinite amounts of time on their hands. What's the proper training for someone that's 3? If you see a gun, ANYWHERE, tell an adult immediately. Every time they see one and tell you, you give them a treat. Basically, every time my kid sees a cop he gets an M&M. It gets irritating, but that's the price you pay.
As far as the safe goes? It's supposed to be bolted to a concrete floor you morons. You've got a loaded gun, in a safe that's not bolted down, you're really lucky the gun didn't just go off INSIDE the damned safe while the kids were bumping it around. And no, the safe probably wouldn't stop the round. Read the directions next time.
Boot to a windows repair disc from Windows Vista or newer /fs:NTFS /p:2
Go to command prompt
format c:
replace c: with whichever drives you want to sink
Writes all 0s to the drive twice.
Call up your It department and tell them you got a bluescreen and now it wont boot
make sure not to leave the repair disc in the drive.
Data is still recoverable if the NSA is after you or something but I doubt you care about that level of security.
I guess hackers are ruined... no ones ever been able to software replicate a security dongle. If they had, there'd be copies of professional audio/video/photo editing software all over the pirate bay! Oh wait...
Having worked in a NOC before, I can tell you that it's not free at any point. Things break... a lot. Fiber makes things a lot more reliable. But they still break. What happens when a fire truck knocks down your fiber trunk? You're going to charge the City $500k for the repair? So then they have to lay off a few firemen... and now you have a public relations nightmare? No way... so you just suck it up and pay for it yourself.
You know how many Fiber trunks we lost because some un-insured drunk drove their car into a pole, the car caught fire and torched the pole, the fiber and the power line? You think they had insurance? Or even if they did, that they had enough to cover that kind of bill?
I applaud Googles attempt here, but they can't charge nothing, it's just not going to work.
And that's the problem with laws that make certain objects/substances illegal. Eventually someone will find a way of obtaining, growing, creating these objects so easily that the law becomes a joke. Now the objects themselves may be dangerous, but because the public has been sheltered from their existence for a period of time, they are left woefully unprepared for when they come flooding into the hands of criminals overnight.
If everyone in that theater was armed and had at least rudimentary firearms safety training... how far do you think the crazy guy would have gotten?
OR, they could just release their own "Steam" distro that could install itself in under 5min and use their new steam client as the front end.
Well, they had a bigger budget then. Congress is not willing to invest hard earned tax dollars into faking landings on mars and such, when we'd not have any communists to make look like asses while we were doing it.
How many kids were KILLED in car accidents in the same period of time? I think the benevolent Consumer Product Safety Commission should issue a stop-sale on automobiles immediately. It's the only safe thing to do.
Well, in a lot of cases I'd agree with you. For example, if he hosted some content on his Russian site that's illegal here and then someone here downloaded it... our current justice department seems to think that's fair game and would go after him. That's obviously an overreach of our government. Same with wikileaks.
But in this case, this man alegedly used a computer network to attack, or hack, sites in the US. I'd liken it to someone using a remote controlled robotic arm to stab you. Even though they are in Russia, the robotic knife attack happens in the US. I'd say that's fair game for extradition. I think that, where things could get sketchy is where the user doesn't actually know which country the servers he's accessing are hosted. So you're in a country where online gambling is legal, and you go to some gambling site... only to later find out that it was hosted in the US and the US federal government is trying to extradite you for using the site...