Depending on the nature of the appointments, policy might forbid that too. It's not unusual to outright prohibit users from using non-facility resources for work-related business. That includes email, file storage, and calendars. If there is any information contained even in something like calendar appointments that could reveal something that's sensitive (even just the name of a patient who's meeting with a particular physician), it might have to reside in-house. It's one thing if your system fails and you have to pick up the pieces...it's another altogether if you find yourself having to apologize to your customers or facing lawsuits because some 3rd party makes a mistake and suffers data leakage. That's why most institutions want to keep the accountability for their data security close.
I am in IT, actually. I just don't agree with the IT-must-have-control mentality.
I don't believe you. If you were "in IT", you'd probably know that most places that deal with --any-- sort of remotely confidential or sensitive data mandate that IT do things a particular way in order to secure that data and the network.
So let's break it down, since you seem to need a primer:
No rogue servers: Because while some end users might know what they're doing, most don't. And a poorly-configured, poorly-secured, and unmanaged server can not only interfere with the official servers, but it can also offer a convenient backdoor into the entire network.
No rogue WAPs or routers: Because most users don't know what they're doing, they just want access. If you have an open WAP on your network, you might as well just set a public computer outside your front door with an anonymous guest login. And rogue consumer-grade routers have a nice habit of running DHCP services by default, which trust me, makes a VERY big mess if you have another, authoritative DHCP server running.
No rogue applications or root login privileges for end users on certain types of systems: Because while most of the time it doesn't matter and a user will only lose productivity time when s/he hoses his or her workstation, there's enough data-stealing malware out there, that it could be a pretty serious problem if some infested computer started hemorrhaging sensitive information.
Seriously, IT does things the way it does for a reason. Sometimes, IT employees don't explain the policies, they just go into parent mode and say, "That's just the way it is, it has to be run by IT", but the real story is mostly just that IT personnel don't have enough hours in the day to figure out which users are genuinely competent sysadmins and which just know too much for their own (and the company's own) good, so the safe assumption is that all users fall under the latter category. Period.
Wow, that almost makes Doug Moon (http://dougmoon.com) look sane.
Okay, not really, but at least he doesn't seem to be fleecing people for the big bucks with his particular brand of lunacy, like "alternative medicine" freaks or $cientologists do. He just believes that to cure yourself, you just need to eat peaches. Lots and lots and lots of peaches.
I really doubt human language at the dawn of our species had anything resembling the languages we use today. Human language evolved, and as the species developed, they gained increased and finer-tuned capacity to use language effectively, both from cognitive and physiological standpoints.
What about the ability to write or otherwise record knowledge? That advancement is arguably more important to human progress than spoken language alone. Considering our species is in the neighborhood of 40,000 years old, and almost all advancements and population expansion came only after the invention of language about 7600 years ago, it would seem that there are certain critical innovations which are necessary to unleash the floodgates of knowledge and advancement. Spoken language with a certain level of complexity is one, written language that takes advantage of that complexity is another.
At the point paintings became standardized glyphs that represented general concepts rather than being depictions of specific events, the human race began to advance at a blistering pace and hasn't looked back all that much. I'm pretty sure human hands haven't changed all that much since "mitochondrial Eve's" time. Our ancestors have had the ability to hold implements of drawing and writing for all this time, and even some of our "cousin" species probably had some potential to do so as well. Capacity to do something does not imply it's used at all, much less used to its full potential. It just means that there's a solid platform to develop from, rather than an insurmountable hurdle that precludes advancement past a certain point.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if scientists find (if they haven't already) that domestic dogs have developed a broader range of vocalizations and perhaps even slightly more vocal ability than wolves. There's potential selection pressure for dogs to be more expressive in terms humans can better understand as they evolve with us. That doesn't mean that they're really all that different than wolves from a physiological standpoint, just that they have a different way of using some capability they already had. That also doesn't mean they are limited by that capability and can't improve on it-- evolution is always working in the background to tune-up an ability.
In particular, it comes from someone counting up all the "begats" in Genesis, and making the ridiculously wild assumption that those are the only people that have existed.
Actually, considering Adam is supposedly the "first human created", the "human race" IS only about a few thousand years old by that account and there are no gaps that would allow for the human race to be any older than that. The verses are rather precise about how long each patriarch lived, the age at which they did their begetting of the next patriarch in the lineage, and there really aren't that many of them so it doesn't take terribly long to count-up. On a scale of 40,000 or so years (based on mitochondrial DNA extrapolation and other dating techniques that attempt to place the dawn of the species of modern humans), a few months' worth of uncertainty because precise birthdays aren't provided simply doesn't account for the margin of disagreement between the Biblical account and scientific research.
Now the only wobble room is that Adam was perhaps the first "racially superior" human to be created directly by his patron deity or something, but that other, inferior humans existed before and parallel to his direct lineage. Or maybe the whole narrative is metaphor and can't be taken literally, except for the verses that Christians find convenient to beat everyone else over the head with & aren't *too* full of bullshit. Not that "Bible-verses-used-as-weapons" and "utter bullshit" are mutually-exclusive...usually the two tend to come together.
The only uncertainty in what the Holy Bible states is in the minds of the religious who are struggling to cling to their delusions and reconcile reality to them. You cannot claim that the entire Holy Bible is entirely literal, infallible, and precise but that it is also metaphorical and subject to creative interpretation at the same time. Those two conditions are, in fact, mutually exclusive.
If I had points, I'd mod you up. This is (or should be) the essence of what you get from a legit purchase-- support resources. It's hard to quantify losses to the developer of 1s and 0s which have been copied, but when pirates are leeching support directly from the company and paying users, there are identifiable losses. Of course, that difference isn't very pronounced with companies that offer poor product support to begin with. All I know is that when I pay money for something, find it doesn't work right, and then the company doesn't find a fix or refund my purchase price, I'm unlikely to ever give them my money again. I'm also unlikely to bother pirating their crap, if I can't get the value I expect out of a legitimate product, where the real added value should be, I'm not going to waste any more of my time.
Or maybe I'm a supercasual gamer who never really heard of these games before, I bought the bundle for just one game that I think looks good (Trine), and I don't give a crap about anything else in the bundle and the chances are slim to none that I'll download or play them.
I actually paid what Steam sells Trine for. But even that Steam price ($20) is kind of high for a game that's about 2 years old (and a couple of other games that are older). If CompUSA was still around, they'd all probably be in the $2.99 bargain software bin. Yes, you might've paid full retail for them a few years ago. I might've paid full retail for them a few years ago too had they been ported to Linux at that time, but I tend not to go too far out of my way to buy Windows games and try to play them under Linux.
Bottom line, a game either has to be really compelling to me (including on price point) or released for Linux for me to be at all interested in it. The latter is the case here, I think the charity angle is cool too, but I don't think anything approaching the release retail price is remotely reasonable for an older game, simply because it was just now ported to Linux. That doesn't make me a cheapskate, it makes me realistic. Make the Linux release contemporary to the other platform(s), it'll probably make headlines, I'll see it, and be willing to pay something approaching initial release retail for it.
The message I want to send to Frozenbyte and the Humble Bundle folks is that I'll pay money even for stale games that have been ported to Linux (better late than never), and that I'd like to encourage these bundle releases, because they catch my attention and sometimes add a little value.
McAfee's business model has been "security through rendering your computer nearly inoperative" for over a decade now, anyway. Just wait until the website gets pwned and stops working, and it will have been successfully "protected".
This is exactly what it comes down to. Yes, Yahoo! might be having some trouble extracting value from some of its stuff. But to make it open source, it's not getting "free labor". It's certainly going to have to give-up some of its exclusive ownership in order to get that labor. Personally, I think it's a great choice; far too many corporations would rather let their patents and other IP just rot when they lack the resources to properly develop them, so nobody benefits from them.
Perhaps they couldn't earn a conviction on an IP address alone, but unless the courts stop granting the MAFIAA things like search warrants and subpoenas based on IP addresses, I'm thinking for the purposes of going on a fishing expedition, it would work well enough. As it seems to work now, just having their private investigators log an IP address allows them to get a subpoena to force the owner of that IP address to open-up its records (if they do any logging of customer/MAC against timestamp against assigned IP), and then taking that information to send the jack-booted record label thugs to bust down your door and take all your computer equipment to search for "potential infringement".
A better system might be to force the MAFIAA to get a unique identifier to seize a specific machine, but that would most likely be the MAC, which are easily-enough spoofed. Also, they like the current situation where they can get vague warrants and fish to their dear little hearts' content.
I would just add to what you're saying, if RISC is so great, why is it that PC beige boxen smoked the pre-Intel Macs pretty convincingly? I recall some downright deceptive advertising on Apple's part, where they were trying to demonstrate the PowerPC's supposed superiority by comparing the bleeding-edge model to older, lower-clocked Pentium II processors rather than the best consumer-grade Pentium II in some RISC-biased benchmarks (it was an ad campaign they were running in about 2001 or thereabouts, most folks probably didn't go to the data to see what they were comparing). And of course, at that time, the Xeon line absolutely smoked them all.
Yeah, the PowerPC architecture was so vastly superior in its RISC-iness, that Apple abandoned it and started making Intel Macs (well, sure, IBM also wanted to take its processor line in a different direction, too). But in an Orwellian twist, the fanbois suddenly seemed to think that Macs had always been based on the vastly superior Intel x86, and the old, inferior PowerPC RISC processors that they had been hyping-up never existed.
So yeah, we've already gone through all that, I'm done with imagined superiority, I want to see a compelling, real-world demonstration of superiority before I'll jump on anybody's bandwagon. Such a demonstration must also include such things as stability and scalability. What is it capable of, what is its price point, how durable is it, and how compatible is it with the stuff most people need to run (i.e., desktop operating systems)? That's what matters. ARM isn't there, RISC in general isn't there, but most members of the x86 family are generally at least in the ballpark. ARM is great for certain things, but not even close to being good for many things, or even "most" things. Superiority only comes in one flavor, and that's what gets the job done and does it in the best way that the application requires.
"t could be mere coincidence that seismic activity spiked right about the time the well was put in service, but how likely is that, really?"
over that time span, it's fairly likely.
Well, not really. That there were multiple magnitude 5+ quakes, primarily over a decade beginning with the Army mucking with a deep dry well, and very little seismic activity of that sort documented prior to or since that event, AND that the seismic activity was centered mostly around north Denver, I'm mostly of the mind that, while nothing can be conclusively proven based on our current understanding of those events, that there are far too many coincidences to simply dismiss as coincidence. OTOH, if the quakes didn't stick out from the baseline of seismic activity and were spread all around the region, there would be no reason to believe the events were related to the well.
I should've looked-up a citation, here's a good writeup: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/colorado/history.php Synopsis: there are generally sporadic, low-magnitude quakes in this region. During the decade of the 60s, right after the well was drilled, there were thousands of measurable quakes, some of them being uncharacteristically high magnitude ones, and they seem to have been focused on an area within 40 miles of Rocky Mountain Arsenal, with much of the damage focused at the Arsenal itself.
That makes a really compelling case overall. In fact, when observing natural phenomena that we don't really understand throroughly, it honestly doesn't get more compelling than that. This is an even stronger case for causation than even I understood based on the talk that I've heard my entire life regarding the quakes.
Sure, but the point is with a CLI and no understanding of its syntax and semantics, you're pretty much dead in the water from the get-go. You could have a deep understanding of networking, but if you're unfamiliar with the syntax of iptables, you're not going to be able to configure a Linux firewall.
Well, there is such a thing as man iptables. Further, an app that would GUI-tize the full capabilities of this CLI utility would probably be more difficult to use. A user who has an advanced knowledge of networking and wants to do something complex and elegant with the firewall is probably going to have a lot more success reading the man pages and using iptables than trying to muddle through the limited choices a GUI generally offers.
As I see it, the primary advantage to a GUI is mostly when it comes to viewing the configuration, since it's WAY easier to lay-out the gestalt of complex data through a GUI, where a CLI has more difficulty formatting the data. The next advantage to a GUI, which is not applicable to an expert user, is to provide a substantially dumbed-down interface that would allow a novice to configure a halfway-functional firewall without being burdened with "difficult" decisions...as with Windows Firewall. You know, situations where an adequately-configured, simple solution is more desirable than a poorly-configured, complex solution. That's simply because a good GUI will generally have some level of confirmation and error-checking, and will also limit the user's ability to make wrong choices.
In Colorado in the 1960s, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal used a ~12,000 ft. deep dry well to inject toxic waste related to chemical weapons the army was manufacturing. There was a bizarre spike in activity and magnitude starting not long after the well was put in service, which continued for about a decade after they stopped injecting the waste, and actually started pumping some back out. There were a few magnitude 5+ quakes, which caused structural damage in the Denver-Boulder metro area.
It could be mere coincidence that seismic activity spiked right about the time the well was put in service, but how likely is that, really? I know, correlation and causation and all, but it was serious enough that folks who lived around here back then still talk about the tremors, and there haven't been any events like that in recent decades. Some of those who remember tend to freak-out at any mention of starting injection recovery in the gas fields north of Denver.
Maybe any gas companies who want to do the hydraulic extraction should pay for any and all damage that appears to correlate to their activity? Arkansas would be a good choice for a study, they'd just have to hire a fleet of trucks to tow the mobile homes back to their pads when they done get shook off and roll down into the holler.
I believe the Paypal spokesperson when she says that the decision to freeze the accounts had nothing to do with the Wikileaks controversy, and it's obvious that the reversal is mostly due to bad publicity or maybe they just had one of the two people in the organization with common sense adjust the policy in this specific case. The arbitrary and capricious manner in which Paypal makes decisions really isn't suited to a company that is handling people's money. In this case, they probably really didn't care about the controversy, they just wanted to have a bank account on file for the customer so they could drain it if there ever was some sort of dispute.
It's a reasonably useful service and my favorable experiences, both as a sender of money and receiver of money outweigh the bad ones. But they just don't seem to have matured to the point where they can be taken seriously as an institution. "The World's Most-Loved Way to Pay and Be Paid" is the stupidest motto ever. I'm sorry, "love" isn't a factor I consider when transferring money in a commercial transaction. "Trust" would describe what I'm looking for, "Secure" would also be an appropriate adjective, even "Easiest" might work. And if I don't want to link a bank account because I'm paranoid about what they'd do with it, that's my prerogative. There's a recent story on the Consumerist blog (consumerist.com) about Paypal "finding" in a user's favor, but debiting more and more money from their account. That's why it might be a bad idea to trust Paypal with your banking information. I would just expect an agency that transfers money and handles sensitive financial information to be a little less incompetent in their fiduciary duties.
"Buying-out" a competitor isn't inherently evil. It's all why you bought them out and what you do with the increased dominance that determines evil. So far, little has changed for the worse with Youtube. Google hasn't leveraged it much at all in ways that would be unfavorable to consumers.
I'm well aware Google is not a charity that's just out for making warm, fuzzy feelings-- I think they're just one of the few companies that realizes that what's good for consumers is what's good for them, and opportunity after opportunity, they continue to take the path which leads to openness and "freedom". At any of those junctures, they could've been thinking about how to lock-in and exploit a userbase, but they didn't.
Take an example: Their world-class search and other services are 100% as functional in Firefox or IE as it is in Google Chrome. But just minutes ago, I was troubleshooting an issue where an end user was getting a blank page while trying to access a particular function on the only internal Microsoft portals in our organization, which is based around Sharepoint. I asked him to try IE, it came right up, and worked correctly. See, that's the difference between Microsoft and Google...Google doesn't inexplicably break all its products in subtle (or not so subtle) ways so you simply have to use all Google stuff to enjoy complete functionality on any Google stuff. Google develops products that are usually fairly open and universally-compatible to make great things that give you a choice, only the competition is so lopsided in almost every case that it's no contest; as a consumer, I generally want what Google provides.
Oh, I don't know about that. I would rather just say Microsoft, "Pot, go f--- yourself."
I keep hearing about how "evil" Google is becoming, but supporting open standards to the detriment of patent-ridden corporate rubbish is not really remotely evil. No sir, "evil" would be buying all their competitors to cement their vendor lock-in, and boosting proprietary technology that furthers only their interests, which are attempts to squeeze as much money out of consumers as possible. Google is furthering its own goals while benefiting consumers at the expense of bloated corporations and patent trolls who were salivating over squeezing more money out of everyone. As far as business models go, Google seems to have more of a symbiotic relationship with consumers, whereas Microsoft is just a crippling parasite.
Yes, it would definitely be feasible in a fully-developed colony. I'm speaking more of the first wave of settlers, the ones who will have to establish the colony, take the huge risks, and make it sustainable. Once a viable settlement and the beginnings of a culture which has the available resources to nurture children have been firmly established, it makes a whole lot of sense to think about making the population sustainable, too.
Even then, though, I wouldn't think so much in terms of designated "breeders", that just seems like the wrong approach...it would make more sense just to have couples permitted in a second-wave resupply mission, and just to allow existing settlers who have paired-up to stop using contraceptives. What would really be the point of colonizing other planets if we don't carry our basic societal culture along with us?
All that, and it doesn't sound like they'd even be taking the open-source code away. It sounds more to me like the company was just planning to abandon the GPL going forward as they revitalize the project internally. Probably so they didn't have to maintain the project and deal with the constant begging for more things from a community which allegedly was giving nothing back.
I was thinking about the same, and I guess I wouldn't even feel that them backing-out should be at the expense of "goodwill". The GPL should be a two-way street, where someone who initiates and maintains a project should ideally receive something back in the form of meaningful contributions; collaboration is not one-sided. How I feel a GPL project should work is that someone is going to accept most of the burden of making the project what it is, but others chip-in with their contributions to make a better product, responding to bug reports and requests, and make it much more-- that way, the project creators get something back in the form of a better product that they didn't have to do ALL of the work for.
If the CEO is right, and there haven't been any meaningful contributions in years, there's no reason to continue putting their hard work under the GPL, period. It was still going to be copyrighted freeware, just not GPL FREEDOMware. I struggle to think of a compelling reason to continue a Sourceforge GPL project if nobody else is helping bear the burdens, yet the owner is being constantly deluged with feature requests. Beg, beg, beg, take, take, take, but no giving back? It's a bit sad that the only energy put into that project in the past 10 years seems to have been more people asking for the developer to put more work into the product, and then a large amount of outrage when they seem to have gotten sick of being pestered and mooched off of and took ownership of their future efforts back. Really, really sad if that was the case.
That's utter and complete nonsense. You have NO RESPONSIBILITY WHATSOEVER to something that does not yet exist, does not yet exist by your choice, and what may never be if you choose not to allow it to exist. The proof: If you don't bring it into existence, then it can't hold you to your perceived obligation. You can't deprive "nothing" of anything, that is an impossibility.
No, sir, you made the selfish, ego-stroking decision to produce kids, and you're just trying to justify that decision through a fallacious, irrational argument that treats undefined, future potentials as not only being fully tangible, but also as somehow owning obligations over you.
I honestly don't have much of a problem with people who declare they're going to have kids because they are selfish and just wanted to. There's nothing wrong with that. What I do have a problem with are people who come up with delusional, bullshit rationalizations in a feeble attempt to make it look like they're not being self-motivated, that someone else is pulling the strings and they're not actually responsible for things they do and say. Yeah, all we need are more people in this world who will learn, by example, from people who are unwilling to accept full responsibility for their decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
Depending on the nature of the appointments, policy might forbid that too. It's not unusual to outright prohibit users from using non-facility resources for work-related business. That includes email, file storage, and calendars. If there is any information contained even in something like calendar appointments that could reveal something that's sensitive (even just the name of a patient who's meeting with a particular physician), it might have to reside in-house. It's one thing if your system fails and you have to pick up the pieces...it's another altogether if you find yourself having to apologize to your customers or facing lawsuits because some 3rd party makes a mistake and suffers data leakage. That's why most institutions want to keep the accountability for their data security close.
I am in IT, actually. I just don't agree with the IT-must-have-control mentality.
I don't believe you. If you were "in IT", you'd probably know that most places that deal with --any-- sort of remotely confidential or sensitive data mandate that IT do things a particular way in order to secure that data and the network.
So let's break it down, since you seem to need a primer:
Seriously, IT does things the way it does for a reason. Sometimes, IT employees don't explain the policies, they just go into parent mode and say, "That's just the way it is, it has to be run by IT", but the real story is mostly just that IT personnel don't have enough hours in the day to figure out which users are genuinely competent sysadmins and which just know too much for their own (and the company's own) good, so the safe assumption is that all users fall under the latter category. Period.
Wow, that almost makes Doug Moon (http://dougmoon.com) look sane.
Okay, not really, but at least he doesn't seem to be fleecing people for the big bucks with his particular brand of lunacy, like "alternative medicine" freaks or $cientologists do. He just believes that to cure yourself, you just need to eat peaches. Lots and lots and lots of peaches.
I really doubt human language at the dawn of our species had anything resembling the languages we use today. Human language evolved, and as the species developed, they gained increased and finer-tuned capacity to use language effectively, both from cognitive and physiological standpoints.
What about the ability to write or otherwise record knowledge? That advancement is arguably more important to human progress than spoken language alone. Considering our species is in the neighborhood of 40,000 years old, and almost all advancements and population expansion came only after the invention of language about 7600 years ago, it would seem that there are certain critical innovations which are necessary to unleash the floodgates of knowledge and advancement. Spoken language with a certain level of complexity is one, written language that takes advantage of that complexity is another.
At the point paintings became standardized glyphs that represented general concepts rather than being depictions of specific events, the human race began to advance at a blistering pace and hasn't looked back all that much. I'm pretty sure human hands haven't changed all that much since "mitochondrial Eve's" time. Our ancestors have had the ability to hold implements of drawing and writing for all this time, and even some of our "cousin" species probably had some potential to do so as well. Capacity to do something does not imply it's used at all, much less used to its full potential. It just means that there's a solid platform to develop from, rather than an insurmountable hurdle that precludes advancement past a certain point.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if scientists find (if they haven't already) that domestic dogs have developed a broader range of vocalizations and perhaps even slightly more vocal ability than wolves. There's potential selection pressure for dogs to be more expressive in terms humans can better understand as they evolve with us. That doesn't mean that they're really all that different than wolves from a physiological standpoint, just that they have a different way of using some capability they already had. That also doesn't mean they are limited by that capability and can't improve on it-- evolution is always working in the background to tune-up an ability.
In particular, it comes from someone counting up all the "begats" in Genesis, and making the ridiculously wild assumption that those are the only people that have existed.
Actually, considering Adam is supposedly the "first human created", the "human race" IS only about a few thousand years old by that account and there are no gaps that would allow for the human race to be any older than that. The verses are rather precise about how long each patriarch lived, the age at which they did their begetting of the next patriarch in the lineage, and there really aren't that many of them so it doesn't take terribly long to count-up. On a scale of 40,000 or so years (based on mitochondrial DNA extrapolation and other dating techniques that attempt to place the dawn of the species of modern humans), a few months' worth of uncertainty because precise birthdays aren't provided simply doesn't account for the margin of disagreement between the Biblical account and scientific research.
Now the only wobble room is that Adam was perhaps the first "racially superior" human to be created directly by his patron deity or something, but that other, inferior humans existed before and parallel to his direct lineage. Or maybe the whole narrative is metaphor and can't be taken literally, except for the verses that Christians find convenient to beat everyone else over the head with & aren't *too* full of bullshit. Not that "Bible-verses-used-as-weapons" and "utter bullshit" are mutually-exclusive...usually the two tend to come together.
The only uncertainty in what the Holy Bible states is in the minds of the religious who are struggling to cling to their delusions and reconcile reality to them. You cannot claim that the entire Holy Bible is entirely literal, infallible, and precise but that it is also metaphorical and subject to creative interpretation at the same time. Those two conditions are, in fact, mutually exclusive.
If I had points, I'd mod you up. This is (or should be) the essence of what you get from a legit purchase-- support resources. It's hard to quantify losses to the developer of 1s and 0s which have been copied, but when pirates are leeching support directly from the company and paying users, there are identifiable losses. Of course, that difference isn't very pronounced with companies that offer poor product support to begin with. All I know is that when I pay money for something, find it doesn't work right, and then the company doesn't find a fix or refund my purchase price, I'm unlikely to ever give them my money again. I'm also unlikely to bother pirating their crap, if I can't get the value I expect out of a legitimate product, where the real added value should be, I'm not going to waste any more of my time.
Or maybe I'm a supercasual gamer who never really heard of these games before, I bought the bundle for just one game that I think looks good (Trine), and I don't give a crap about anything else in the bundle and the chances are slim to none that I'll download or play them.
I actually paid what Steam sells Trine for. But even that Steam price ($20) is kind of high for a game that's about 2 years old (and a couple of other games that are older). If CompUSA was still around, they'd all probably be in the $2.99 bargain software bin. Yes, you might've paid full retail for them a few years ago. I might've paid full retail for them a few years ago too had they been ported to Linux at that time, but I tend not to go too far out of my way to buy Windows games and try to play them under Linux.
Bottom line, a game either has to be really compelling to me (including on price point) or released for Linux for me to be at all interested in it. The latter is the case here, I think the charity angle is cool too, but I don't think anything approaching the release retail price is remotely reasonable for an older game, simply because it was just now ported to Linux. That doesn't make me a cheapskate, it makes me realistic. Make the Linux release contemporary to the other platform(s), it'll probably make headlines, I'll see it, and be willing to pay something approaching initial release retail for it.
The message I want to send to Frozenbyte and the Humble Bundle folks is that I'll pay money even for stale games that have been ported to Linux (better late than never), and that I'd like to encourage these bundle releases, because they catch my attention and sometimes add a little value.
McAfee's business model has been "security through rendering your computer nearly inoperative" for over a decade now, anyway. Just wait until the website gets pwned and stops working, and it will have been successfully "protected".
This is exactly what it comes down to. Yes, Yahoo! might be having some trouble extracting value from some of its stuff. But to make it open source, it's not getting "free labor". It's certainly going to have to give-up some of its exclusive ownership in order to get that labor. Personally, I think it's a great choice; far too many corporations would rather let their patents and other IP just rot when they lack the resources to properly develop them, so nobody benefits from them.
Perhaps they couldn't earn a conviction on an IP address alone, but unless the courts stop granting the MAFIAA things like search warrants and subpoenas based on IP addresses, I'm thinking for the purposes of going on a fishing expedition, it would work well enough. As it seems to work now, just having their private investigators log an IP address allows them to get a subpoena to force the owner of that IP address to open-up its records (if they do any logging of customer/MAC against timestamp against assigned IP), and then taking that information to send the jack-booted record label thugs to bust down your door and take all your computer equipment to search for "potential infringement".
A better system might be to force the MAFIAA to get a unique identifier to seize a specific machine, but that would most likely be the MAC, which are easily-enough spoofed. Also, they like the current situation where they can get vague warrants and fish to their dear little hearts' content.
That...wow. I heard the words, but it was like she was speaking a different language.
I think some studio must have a random IT jargon generator.
I would just add to what you're saying, if RISC is so great, why is it that PC beige boxen smoked the pre-Intel Macs pretty convincingly? I recall some downright deceptive advertising on Apple's part, where they were trying to demonstrate the PowerPC's supposed superiority by comparing the bleeding-edge model to older, lower-clocked Pentium II processors rather than the best consumer-grade Pentium II in some RISC-biased benchmarks (it was an ad campaign they were running in about 2001 or thereabouts, most folks probably didn't go to the data to see what they were comparing). And of course, at that time, the Xeon line absolutely smoked them all.
Yeah, the PowerPC architecture was so vastly superior in its RISC-iness, that Apple abandoned it and started making Intel Macs (well, sure, IBM also wanted to take its processor line in a different direction, too). But in an Orwellian twist, the fanbois suddenly seemed to think that Macs had always been based on the vastly superior Intel x86, and the old, inferior PowerPC RISC processors that they had been hyping-up never existed.
So yeah, we've already gone through all that, I'm done with imagined superiority, I want to see a compelling, real-world demonstration of superiority before I'll jump on anybody's bandwagon. Such a demonstration must also include such things as stability and scalability. What is it capable of, what is its price point, how durable is it, and how compatible is it with the stuff most people need to run (i.e., desktop operating systems)? That's what matters. ARM isn't there, RISC in general isn't there, but most members of the x86 family are generally at least in the ballpark. ARM is great for certain things, but not even close to being good for many things, or even "most" things. Superiority only comes in one flavor, and that's what gets the job done and does it in the best way that the application requires.
A profanity-laced comment that's such dramatic hyperbole that it might be considered idiotic, posted as an AC? Oh gee, how likely is THAT?!!!
"t could be mere coincidence that seismic activity spiked right about the time the well was put in service, but how likely is that, really?"
over that time span, it's fairly likely.
Well, not really. That there were multiple magnitude 5+ quakes, primarily over a decade beginning with the Army mucking with a deep dry well, and very little seismic activity of that sort documented prior to or since that event, AND that the seismic activity was centered mostly around north Denver, I'm mostly of the mind that, while nothing can be conclusively proven based on our current understanding of those events, that there are far too many coincidences to simply dismiss as coincidence. OTOH, if the quakes didn't stick out from the baseline of seismic activity and were spread all around the region, there would be no reason to believe the events were related to the well.
I should've looked-up a citation, here's a good writeup: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/colorado/history.php Synopsis: there are generally sporadic, low-magnitude quakes in this region. During the decade of the 60s, right after the well was drilled, there were thousands of measurable quakes, some of them being uncharacteristically high magnitude ones, and they seem to have been focused on an area within 40 miles of Rocky Mountain Arsenal, with much of the damage focused at the Arsenal itself.
That makes a really compelling case overall. In fact, when observing natural phenomena that we don't really understand throroughly, it honestly doesn't get more compelling than that. This is an even stronger case for causation than even I understood based on the talk that I've heard my entire life regarding the quakes.
Sure, but the point is with a CLI and no understanding of its syntax and semantics, you're pretty much dead in the water from the get-go. You could have a deep understanding of networking, but if you're unfamiliar with the syntax of iptables, you're not going to be able to configure a Linux firewall.
Well, there is such a thing as man iptables. Further, an app that would GUI-tize the full capabilities of this CLI utility would probably be more difficult to use. A user who has an advanced knowledge of networking and wants to do something complex and elegant with the firewall is probably going to have a lot more success reading the man pages and using iptables than trying to muddle through the limited choices a GUI generally offers.
As I see it, the primary advantage to a GUI is mostly when it comes to viewing the configuration, since it's WAY easier to lay-out the gestalt of complex data through a GUI, where a CLI has more difficulty formatting the data. The next advantage to a GUI, which is not applicable to an expert user, is to provide a substantially dumbed-down interface that would allow a novice to configure a halfway-functional firewall without being burdened with "difficult" decisions...as with Windows Firewall. You know, situations where an adequately-configured, simple solution is more desirable than a poorly-configured, complex solution. That's simply because a good GUI will generally have some level of confirmation and error-checking, and will also limit the user's ability to make wrong choices.
In Colorado in the 1960s, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal used a ~12,000 ft. deep dry well to inject toxic waste related to chemical weapons the army was manufacturing. There was a bizarre spike in activity and magnitude starting not long after the well was put in service, which continued for about a decade after they stopped injecting the waste, and actually started pumping some back out. There were a few magnitude 5+ quakes, which caused structural damage in the Denver-Boulder metro area.
It could be mere coincidence that seismic activity spiked right about the time the well was put in service, but how likely is that, really? I know, correlation and causation and all, but it was serious enough that folks who lived around here back then still talk about the tremors, and there haven't been any events like that in recent decades. Some of those who remember tend to freak-out at any mention of starting injection recovery in the gas fields north of Denver.
Maybe any gas companies who want to do the hydraulic extraction should pay for any and all damage that appears to correlate to their activity? Arkansas would be a good choice for a study, they'd just have to hire a fleet of trucks to tow the mobile homes back to their pads when they done get shook off and roll down into the holler.
Yeah! Wouldn't that be CDC or something? No, wait, it would probably be a group we have never even heard of, because hackers are like ninjas, right?
I believe the Paypal spokesperson when she says that the decision to freeze the accounts had nothing to do with the Wikileaks controversy, and it's obvious that the reversal is mostly due to bad publicity or maybe they just had one of the two people in the organization with common sense adjust the policy in this specific case. The arbitrary and capricious manner in which Paypal makes decisions really isn't suited to a company that is handling people's money. In this case, they probably really didn't care about the controversy, they just wanted to have a bank account on file for the customer so they could drain it if there ever was some sort of dispute.
It's a reasonably useful service and my favorable experiences, both as a sender of money and receiver of money outweigh the bad ones. But they just don't seem to have matured to the point where they can be taken seriously as an institution. "The World's Most-Loved Way to Pay and Be Paid" is the stupidest motto ever. I'm sorry, "love" isn't a factor I consider when transferring money in a commercial transaction. "Trust" would describe what I'm looking for, "Secure" would also be an appropriate adjective, even "Easiest" might work. And if I don't want to link a bank account because I'm paranoid about what they'd do with it, that's my prerogative. There's a recent story on the Consumerist blog (consumerist.com) about Paypal "finding" in a user's favor, but debiting more and more money from their account. That's why it might be a bad idea to trust Paypal with your banking information. I would just expect an agency that transfers money and handles sensitive financial information to be a little less incompetent in their fiduciary duties.
"Buying-out" a competitor isn't inherently evil. It's all why you bought them out and what you do with the increased dominance that determines evil. So far, little has changed for the worse with Youtube. Google hasn't leveraged it much at all in ways that would be unfavorable to consumers.
I'm well aware Google is not a charity that's just out for making warm, fuzzy feelings-- I think they're just one of the few companies that realizes that what's good for consumers is what's good for them, and opportunity after opportunity, they continue to take the path which leads to openness and "freedom". At any of those junctures, they could've been thinking about how to lock-in and exploit a userbase, but they didn't.
Take an example: Their world-class search and other services are 100% as functional in Firefox or IE as it is in Google Chrome. But just minutes ago, I was troubleshooting an issue where an end user was getting a blank page while trying to access a particular function on the only internal Microsoft portals in our organization, which is based around Sharepoint. I asked him to try IE, it came right up, and worked correctly. See, that's the difference between Microsoft and Google...Google doesn't inexplicably break all its products in subtle (or not so subtle) ways so you simply have to use all Google stuff to enjoy complete functionality on any Google stuff. Google develops products that are usually fairly open and universally-compatible to make great things that give you a choice, only the competition is so lopsided in almost every case that it's no contest; as a consumer, I generally want what Google provides.
Oh, I don't know about that. I would rather just say Microsoft, "Pot, go f--- yourself."
I keep hearing about how "evil" Google is becoming, but supporting open standards to the detriment of patent-ridden corporate rubbish is not really remotely evil. No sir, "evil" would be buying all their competitors to cement their vendor lock-in, and boosting proprietary technology that furthers only their interests, which are attempts to squeeze as much money out of consumers as possible. Google is furthering its own goals while benefiting consumers at the expense of bloated corporations and patent trolls who were salivating over squeezing more money out of everyone. As far as business models go, Google seems to have more of a symbiotic relationship with consumers, whereas Microsoft is just a crippling parasite.
Yes, it would definitely be feasible in a fully-developed colony. I'm speaking more of the first wave of settlers, the ones who will have to establish the colony, take the huge risks, and make it sustainable. Once a viable settlement and the beginnings of a culture which has the available resources to nurture children have been firmly established, it makes a whole lot of sense to think about making the population sustainable, too.
Even then, though, I wouldn't think so much in terms of designated "breeders", that just seems like the wrong approach...it would make more sense just to have couples permitted in a second-wave resupply mission, and just to allow existing settlers who have paired-up to stop using contraceptives. What would really be the point of colonizing other planets if we don't carry our basic societal culture along with us?
All that, and it doesn't sound like they'd even be taking the open-source code away. It sounds more to me like the company was just planning to abandon the GPL going forward as they revitalize the project internally. Probably so they didn't have to maintain the project and deal with the constant begging for more things from a community which allegedly was giving nothing back.
I was thinking about the same, and I guess I wouldn't even feel that them backing-out should be at the expense of "goodwill". The GPL should be a two-way street, where someone who initiates and maintains a project should ideally receive something back in the form of meaningful contributions; collaboration is not one-sided. How I feel a GPL project should work is that someone is going to accept most of the burden of making the project what it is, but others chip-in with their contributions to make a better product, responding to bug reports and requests, and make it much more-- that way, the project creators get something back in the form of a better product that they didn't have to do ALL of the work for.
If the CEO is right, and there haven't been any meaningful contributions in years, there's no reason to continue putting their hard work under the GPL, period. It was still going to be copyrighted freeware, just not GPL FREEDOMware. I struggle to think of a compelling reason to continue a Sourceforge GPL project if nobody else is helping bear the burdens, yet the owner is being constantly deluged with feature requests. Beg, beg, beg, take, take, take, but no giving back? It's a bit sad that the only energy put into that project in the past 10 years seems to have been more people asking for the developer to put more work into the product, and then a large amount of outrage when they seem to have gotten sick of being pestered and mooched off of and took ownership of their future efforts back. Really, really sad if that was the case.
That's utter and complete nonsense. You have NO RESPONSIBILITY WHATSOEVER to something that does not yet exist, does not yet exist by your choice, and what may never be if you choose not to allow it to exist. The proof: If you don't bring it into existence, then it can't hold you to your perceived obligation. You can't deprive "nothing" of anything, that is an impossibility.
No, sir, you made the selfish, ego-stroking decision to produce kids, and you're just trying to justify that decision through a fallacious, irrational argument that treats undefined, future potentials as not only being fully tangible, but also as somehow owning obligations over you.
I honestly don't have much of a problem with people who declare they're going to have kids because they are selfish and just wanted to. There's nothing wrong with that. What I do have a problem with are people who come up with delusional, bullshit rationalizations in a feeble attempt to make it look like they're not being self-motivated, that someone else is pulling the strings and they're not actually responsible for things they do and say. Yeah, all we need are more people in this world who will learn, by example, from people who are unwilling to accept full responsibility for their decisions.