No American citizen who has "publish[ed] the protected names of American intelligence sources who collaborate with the US military or intelligence community" in the past would be affected by this law.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Because all trade networks connect to each other now, and the internet is the cheapest way than building dedicated hardlinks to innerconnect to all stock exchanges. I doubt that any exchange would be willing to drop billions to build trans-atlantic/pacific data exchanges, unless something catastrophic happened. Plus it creates central points of weakness.
The internet 'routes around damage'.
Dedicated links are the only links which can be secured. It's worth it.
And no, it doesn't necessarily give you a single point of failure, or "central points of wekaness" any more than the internet does.
The worst case scenario for losing electronic trading is small delay in trades going through, thus killing off high frequency trading and forcing people to INVEST. This would be a GOOD THING.
No, it's two factor: something you know (password) + something you have (cell phone or landline)
When you present these digitally, they are both "something you know". Bits are logical, not physical. You cannot verify one blob of bits as being the original blob of bits.
Fair point, the password store is a weak point - but not for remote attackers. They need to get the DB, the key file and the password from my head, most of which requires physical access to me. If someone is that determined to get access to my accounts or impersonate me then they could just kidnap me and be done with it.
Or be a spurned lover OH WAIT THIS IS SLASHDOT.
My pycho ex took the direct route of going for me with a large knife and the sharp end of a broken wine bottle. I can tell you that at moments like that you don't care about who might have access to your credentials database!
I consider my nuts part of my credentials database.
So you aren't a person with common sense, are you?
You can only move a limited number of people over a given stretch of transportation infrastructure for a given transportation method.
Shocking!
Of course roads and rails are subject to rationing: that's what a traffic jam IS. It's a queue of people waiting to use a scarce resource.
A traffic jam is not the result of rationing. Rationing is a deliberate act to control the availability of a limited resource. A traffic jam is no such thing.
The problem of adding more roads is twofold: first, because roads are not rationed by price, adding more roads simply shifts latent demand to actual demand. People who wouldn't make a given trip because the roads were too crowded now will.
I take it you've never driven anywhere other than a megalopolis. Go visit a state other than New York or California. There are plenty of roads in the country that are wide open the vast majority of the time. The previous generation talked about the freedom of the open road. The open road is not gone, it's just outside of your myopic view. The fact that adding a couple more roads where you've been didn't magically fix traffic just means that you didn't ass enough roads to meet the demand. You can call that demand "latent" if you want to cover for your inability to properly assess the demand, but it still ultimately means that you didn't meet demand.
Second, and this is the truly insurmountable problem, more roads means more intersections, and intersections are the things that slow down traffic the most.
More roads does not mean more intersections. The most common form of "more road" is expanding existing streets and highways to have more lanes. And guess what, it works beautifully. Adding actual new roads is only an issue in megalopolises where everything is poorly designed and jam packed with no room for growth or even maintenance to occur. Intersections control traffic. They do not result in more or less traffic, they make it more bursty. No one can sit at an intersection and say "This fucking new cross street they put in has ruined my commute!". That cross street is connected to a new road which is reliving congestion elsewhere. It is absolutely a huge net gain to have a new road as long as it gets used. (And if it doesn't get used much, you adjust the timing and sensors for the intersection it's connected to, to minimize the negative impact!)
You know I don't have any alt accounts. I don't mod, I don't meta-mod, I write comments, from one account so everyone will know that the comment came from me. Don't whine just because I am legitimately more popular than an ex-troll with the account name "sexconker"
You do, and I won't go through your post history to prove the 2 I know of for sure. No one cares, and you'd deny it forever. I'm not whining, I'm laughing. Seems to me people called you out on your bullshit in this thread and modded your posts properly as flamebait.
Obama hasn't spent more than Bush by a long shot.
How much has Obama spent up til now? How much had Bush spent after 2 years?
How much has Obama promised to spend? How much did Bush spend?
Give actual numbers, please. You're the one who made the original (laughable) claim that Bush spent more than Obama.
You can create jobs because some uses of money create more jobs than other uses of money.
"You can create gold from lead because some uses of lead create more gold than other uses of lead." Not only is this a logical fallacy in terms of proving that you can create jobs by spending money, the simple fact is no use of money is any more successful at creating jobs than any other. Money does not create jobs. It never has. It never will. Money itself is not one of your treasured "renewable resources". You could burn physical cash and nothing of any significance would happen. All of those misprinted, new $100 bills? The cost of printing those was paid to someone. Someone who did (*gasp*) a job. If you had not printed those new $100 bills and instead spent the money elsewhere, you would get the exact same amount of "job" out of it.
Job creation comes from demand and availability of capital.
Only if you're an idiot and want the jobs to be a leech on everyone's taxes. Have money, will throw at all! And as for demand, no government-funded job has ever been in high demand. That's why we get pork bullshit like building a jet in 43 different states, building bridges to your own asshole, recycling centers manned by people instead of machines, a post office filled with ineptitude, etc.
Sustainability comes from using renewable resources, nothing else.
So you understand simple physics! Too bad money is not a renewable resource. Money is a measure of wealth (real world assets) and productivity. A renewable resource is one that you get back later, for free. Productivity is a relatively fixed thing. Once you waste it by having people do pointless jobs, it's gone. You don't magically get man hours credited to some phantom account at the end of every month. If your workers dick about on the factory line, that productivity is gone.
"Demand" as a market force comes from three things: desire, ability to pay, and willingness to pay. Specifically, demand is defined as the quantity of a well defined good or service that people are willing to buy during a particular time period, and increases or decreases as the price falls or rises while all other factors remain constant.
And the public has no desire for more government wage jockeys doing pointless jobs on their dime. And the public loses their ability to pay with every government-funded job. Willingness to pay is the same thing as desire.
And when the public loses the desire and willingness to pay for something, the demand falls. And when demand falls, the government bails out GM. Brilliant.
Other interesting questions that science has answered: how magnets work, why we have tides, and how the moon got there.
Science has NOT answered how magnets work, nor how the moon got there, actually. There are several theories about the moon and we'll likely never know for sure. For magnetism, gravity, etc., we mostly understand how they behave, but we're
Roads are an even bigger waste of time. How many hours per year do you waste sitting in traffic? For me, its a lot, and my commute isn't even that long. Remember, there are two ways to ration a scarce commodity like transportation: wait in line, or make people pay. We could add roads until the whole country was covered in them, and it wouldn't help, it would just raise demand. More roads, more people driving. Another option is to make all roads toll roads. You won't find a lot of support for that. The final, and IMHO only workable option is mass transit. It moves more people over the same infrastructure with less overall waiting. Which do you prefer, traffic jams, expensive toll roads, or mass transit?
And of course the other question is, would you rather spend an hour driving in stressful traffic, or an hour and a half sitting on a comfortable train, doing some work or playing on your laptop?
How many hours per year would you waste trying to get somewhere you needed to go if we DIDN'T have roads? Derp.
Roads and rails are not commodities. They are not subject to rationing. Physical resources to build and maintain roads and rails are technically a commodity, but these are not in short supply by any measure. Physical space for roads and railways is a commodity, and believe it or not, the USA has PLENTY of open space. The problem you see is people concentrating into poorly-planned, densely-packed megalopolises. The answer for those cities to put more money into their transportation infrastructure. The answer for people who want to spend less time in traffic, have better-maintained roads, etc. is to move away from the cities, to a place where space is not a scarce commodity.
Mass transit of people in the form of trains will never work when people want to go different places. The US is not Europe. The US is not Japan. The US is fucking huge. To accommodate such a scheme would require replacing nearly every road with rails, and inventing some sort of train that can stop and turn on a dime like a car. Also, it has to be efficient. Daily mass transit will never be a viable option for most people. As for occasional mass transit, we've moved on to superior air travel.
Of course I'd prefer to play games or jerk off instead of driving. But not to the point where my overall trip time would be extended, my overall costs would skyrocket, shit would be less convenient, and my flexibility and freedom would be gone.
America does not want trains for regular transit. America can not afford trains for regular transit. Trains are a terribly inefficient, unmanageable, inferior option for regular transit.
Obama spent all the money? Nope. Bush spent all the money. Bush started two wars and increased spending while slashing taxes. The bailout was Bush's baby. You might be able to legitimately claim that Obama hasn't done enough to fix the budget problems, but most people would like the government to create jobs during a recession rather than cut them, don't you think?
Not even all your alt accounts can save this shitty post from the mods, eh spun? Obama is tracking well ahead (in excess) of Bush Junior in terms of spending.
You can never "create" jobs. You can only move money around from one place to another. Job creation comes from demand and sustainability. Sustainability comes from productivity of the workforce, and is hard-capped by physical resources. Anyone who can tell you where demand comes from would be posting from my crystal palace on the moon.
Yet another reason I'm glad I've always recommended against Linksys to friends and family. Shoddy equipment in the past, and no preparation for the future now.
No preparation for the future now, but they'll be prepared for now in the future. Then they'll send that preparation back in time and everything will be hunky-dory.
Haven't you seen the pointless brand awareness ads that CISCO runs, showing a classroom in China and one in the US teleconferencing? Or the giant out-side displays on opposite sides of the planet?
Clearly these ads demonstrate CISCO's mastery of all things time and space. Not only is there 0 latency, the fucking sun is high in the sky in both places at the same fucking time. I wrote a detailed email to every public email address I could find for CISCO, but I only got one drone response. The drone asked me to clarify my concerns, to which I replied "YOUR FUCKING ADVERTISEMENTS SHOW A DISTURBING DISREGARD FOR THE FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF PHYSICS". Still waiting for a response.
The answer here is to train users to have different passwords for each important account (I do, keeping record of them in a local keepass DB, itself protected by a strong password and keyfile on a USB stick, though that is too much hassle for many people).
All that work and in the end you effectively have a single password for everything. Passwords are like testicles in a devil's threeway - you must never let them touch.
Fair point, the password store is a weak point - but not for remote attackers. They need to get the DB, the key file and the password from my head, most of which requires physical access to me. If someone is that determined to get access to my accounts or impersonate me then they could just kidnap me and be done with it.
I'm going to have to issue you a cease and desist for that fucking analogy. That analogy is 100% bullshit. A frog will jump out of a pot of water that's too hot, or too cold, regardless of how gradually you've changed the temperature.
The answer here is to train users to have different passwords for each important account (I do, keeping record of them in a local keepass DB, itself protected by a strong password and keyfile on a USB stick, though that is too much hassle for many people).
All that work and in the end you effectively have a single password for everything. Passwords are like testicles in a devil's threeway - you must never let them touch.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the courts shot that down when Apple tried to claim the desktop?
You're wrong. For a variety of reasons. The chief of which being the fact that you believe courts deciding things once affects all future cases. Precedent is just a means by which to expedite and normalize justice. It has no actual power. Any judge in any court could completely ignore every single mote of precedence if they felt the desire to (*gasp*) judge the case before them on its own merits. But that would be too much work. It would require critical thinking. And the jackasses and elephants would scream about activist judges.
Fewer features in each major release should mean more time spent fixing bugs. Would hope so, anyway. Firefox 4 beta 10 uses 100% of my CPU almost constantly (on Mac OS X 10.6) and I have no idea what new "feature" is responsible for this.
I've come to realize that it's just firefox. I was on 3.6 or whatever the latest is, and the damned thing was always 100% CPU. Couldn't even youtube anything. So I trip out all of the addons, same shit. So I go to 4 beta 10, same shit.
Fuck it, whatever. Only happens on my work machine anyway.
So I opened the original image file in GIMP, went to save it as a JPEG, made sure the preview was turned on, and saw nothing. Of course, this is because I save every jpeg at 1x1, floating point, 100 quality.
So I reduced the quality. After a while, the image appears. A change of 1% (from "82" to "83", for example) can render the message completely visible, and another change can render it completely invisible.
I did a low strength blur (imperceptible to my eyes) on the image, and went through the same experiment, and the message was rendered completely gone. I suspect that same could be done by adding a small amount of noise, etc.
As even the summary mentions, the technique applies to jpeg-compressed images.
As even the post you replied to mentions, he grabbed a messaged-jpeg via print screen, and recompressed it via jpeg at "60" quality (I'm assuming that's photoshop's "60").
The screenshot provided is in two halves: The top half is the original uncompressed image, and the bottom half is the recomrpessed image. The file format png was chosen for the combined view specifically to avoid compressing the top half and compressing the bottom half a second time.
Nice try at getting fast karma from a first post, but that's not going to work. The screen shot will already be of the compressed image, and will still show signs of re-compressing it.
Nice try at getting fast karma from a first post correction, but I'm still going to correct you.
Anyone copying an image will have no problems. Copy-evident my ass, the file is 100% the same if I grab it and throw it in a torrent.
As for editing to remove watermarks / logos, the recompression will only show the message if your quality is below a certain threshold. If you edit an image to remove the owner's information, and you see a "THIS IMAGE COPIED FROM SITE.COM" message, just save it at a higher quality.
Inserting the message will be a balance between visibility on the original (you want this low) and sensitivity to recompression (you want this high).
And if someone is insistent on using a low quality jpeg after editing an image you own, they can still easily defeat the scheme by doing an extremely slight blur on the entire image.
So the bottom line is that no, this isn't a copy-evident feature, it's an edit-evident feature, and one that is trivial to circumvent.
King says "HEY Archimedes! Make me a weapon!" Archimedes says "Okay." Archimedes goes home and works on some shit for a while. Two months later he comes back to the King to present his new weapon. He passes out a dozen mirrors to the guards and has them aim them at the King.
King says "WTF is this shit? It's slightly annoying." Archimedes says "Exactly! If we were outside in the sun, you'd have to close your eyes! And if we had 10,000 troops, we could set ships on fire! No army would dare approach our coast!"
King says "...during a sunny, hot, dry day. Archimedes you fuckwit, this is the Mediterranean. And they'll be in the ocean. Go build me a mechanical ass fucker so I can punish you with it."
You're an idiot, and your analogy does not fit the situation at all.
Google knowingly, willingly, and intentionally sent Bing the following information:
User searched for diougaslgo
User clicked on twuiagfjd
Bing took that information and incorporated into their algorithm.
After a period of weeks of poisoning the most obscure terms (so the weight of Google's poisoning influence would be high), Google was still only able to get a 7-9% success rate.
Bing is NOT copying Google's search results. Bing is copying USER activity. USER's can disable this if they wish.
Google claiming some sort of ownership to this information is absurd. That's like claiming ownership to the idea that a search for "wikipedia", with a follow up click to "wikipedia.org", might mean the user is looking for "wikipedia.org".
Yes, Google's results are helping that along, but Bing is not copying Google's results. Why would they? Google's results are often shit, and Bing is billing itself as a completely different animal. Bing is being damned smart when they use user data. It's the single most valid form of data with regards to "search for x, actually want y". Google simply never looks at this data, because they fear clickfraud. Yes, it's vulnerable to poisoning, but simple throttles can control that. Google only got a 7-9% success rate over a period of weeks of automated poisoning across a bunch of Google IPs, for completely random search terms. What Google did was embarrassing. No idea why they came out and shouted about it like it was an achievement.
I would like to see if this falls into the abuse of said monopoly.
I believe it absolutely is an example of an abusive monopoly, and legal action should be taken to split up the giant monopoly into separate companies.
For far too long Google has used their monopoly position in search and advertising to abuse the competition. And now we have a case where Google has come out and admitted to, nay, CHAMPIONED, the fact that they are actively poisoning the search results of their competitors!
Google Search, Google Ads, Google Platforms (Android, Chrome, etc.), and Google Productivity (GMail, Docs, Calendar, etc.) need to be entirely separate entities!
I think they may very well have gotten all libertarian if google had tried, or indeed still does try, to involve the court system.
I think the way most of us, and at the very least I, view this as a simple case of dirty pool (think that may have been in one of the google posts).
I think what is mostly being missed in all of the talk about this is the fact that if we take Microsoft assertion, that what google did was click fraud, at face value then we are left with the fact that one person manually clicking on a random string can push RIM's home page to the top slot in Bing's results for that string. Google went out of their way to say that they never use user clicks for ranking. I suspect this is because of how absurdly easy such a system is to game.
Google actively poisoned results for 100 random terms (which had little or no results prior to the poisoning). They did this for a period of weeks. They did not reveal how many actual clicks they pushed out, but I guarantee you it was automated, it was an absurd number, and it was across a bunch of IPs at Google. In the end, they got less than a 10% success rate.
If you tried to poison an actual valid term, you'd need astronomically more clicks.
Clickfraud is a problem, but actual clicks are the single best measure of what is valid. Most users do NOT participate in the page rank up/down shit. Spammers (SEOs) do. Most users do NOT value 1000 blog comments that simply contain the first 100 words of the very blog entry you're already at. Spammers (SEOs and bloggers wanting attention) do. Every avenue for improvement you open up to "the community" will be exploited by spammers. Some manual control absolutely has to be at the back end regardless of what you do. And you absolutely have to have some level human monitoring and overrides to catch and control the spammers. Google's little exercise proves that Bing does indeed have at least some automated checks to throttle the influence of potential click fraud. Poisoned en masse for weeks, and less than a 10% success rate on the most obscure terms imaginable. Rather embarrassing for Google.
I have absolutely no idea why Google thought it would be a good idea to throw out this laughable accusation, and offer up a ton of evidence of them poisoning Bing. And I have no idea why they would grasp at the "OMG PRIVACY! IE SENDS DATA TO MS" straw when Google has orders of magnitude more data and uses it in ways that would make Zuckerberg cream his pants if he were able to do the same.
Slashdot Mirror
Our politicians are a joke.
Julian Assange is not subject to US law.
No American citizen who has "publish[ed] the protected names of American intelligence sources who collaborate with the US military or intelligence community" in the past would be affected by this law.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Because all trade networks connect to each other now, and the internet is the cheapest way than building dedicated hardlinks to innerconnect to all stock exchanges. I doubt that any exchange would be willing to drop billions to build trans-atlantic/pacific data exchanges, unless something catastrophic happened. Plus it creates central points of weakness.
The internet 'routes around damage'.
Dedicated links are the only links which can be secured.
It's worth it.
And no, it doesn't necessarily give you a single point of failure, or "central points of wekaness" any more than the internet does.
The worst case scenario for losing electronic trading is small delay in trades going through, thus killing off high frequency trading and forcing people to INVEST.
This would be a GOOD THING.
How can I innovate if I can't copy and sell the ideas of others?!
No, it's two factor: something you know (password) + something you have (cell phone or landline)
When you present these digitally, they are both "something you know".
Bits are logical, not physical.
You cannot verify one blob of bits as being the original blob of bits.
Keepass
Congratulations.
Now accessing all of your passwords is as trivial as accessing one of them.
Fair point, the password store is a weak point - but not for remote attackers. They need to get the DB, the key file and the password from my head, most of which requires physical access to me. If someone is that determined to get access to my accounts or impersonate me then they could just kidnap me and be done with it.
Or be a spurned lover OH WAIT THIS IS SLASHDOT.
My pycho ex took the direct route of going for me with a large knife and the sharp end of a broken wine bottle. I can tell you that at moments like that you don't care about who might have access to your credentials database!
I consider my nuts part of my credentials database.
So, you aren't a civil engineer, are you?
So you aren't a person with common sense, are you?
You can only move a limited number of people over a given stretch of transportation infrastructure for a given transportation method.
Shocking!
Of course roads and rails are subject to rationing: that's what a traffic jam IS. It's a queue of people waiting to use a scarce resource.
A traffic jam is not the result of rationing. Rationing is a deliberate act to control the availability of a limited resource. A traffic jam is no such thing.
The problem of adding more roads is twofold: first, because roads are not rationed by price, adding more roads simply shifts latent demand to actual demand. People who wouldn't make a given trip because the roads were too crowded now will.
I take it you've never driven anywhere other than a megalopolis. Go visit a state other than New York or California. There are plenty of roads in the country that are wide open the vast majority of the time. The previous generation talked about the freedom of the open road. The open road is not gone, it's just outside of your myopic view. The fact that adding a couple more roads where you've been didn't magically fix traffic just means that you didn't ass enough roads to meet the demand. You can call that demand "latent" if you want to cover for your inability to properly assess the demand, but it still ultimately means that you didn't meet demand.
Second, and this is the truly insurmountable problem, more roads means more intersections, and intersections are the things that slow down traffic the most.
More roads does not mean more intersections. The most common form of "more road" is expanding existing streets and highways to have more lanes. And guess what, it works beautifully. Adding actual new roads is only an issue in megalopolises where everything is poorly designed and jam packed with no room for growth or even maintenance to occur. Intersections control traffic. They do not result in more or less traffic, they make it more bursty. No one can sit at an intersection and say "This fucking new cross street they put in has ruined my commute!". That cross street is connected to a new road which is reliving congestion elsewhere. It is absolutely a huge net gain to have a new road as long as it gets used. (And if it doesn't get used much, you adjust the timing and sensors for the intersection it's connected to, to minimize the negative impact!)
You know I don't have any alt accounts. I don't mod, I don't meta-mod, I write comments, from one account so everyone will know that the comment came from me. Don't whine just because I am legitimately more popular than an ex-troll with the account name "sexconker"
You do, and I won't go through your post history to prove the 2 I know of for sure. No one cares, and you'd deny it forever. I'm not whining, I'm laughing. Seems to me people called you out on your bullshit in this thread and modded your posts properly as flamebait.
Obama hasn't spent more than Bush by a long shot.
How much has Obama spent up til now?
How much had Bush spent after 2 years?
How much has Obama promised to spend?
How much did Bush spend?
Give actual numbers, please. You're the one who made the original (laughable) claim that Bush spent more than Obama.
You can create jobs because some uses of money create more jobs than other uses of money.
"You can create gold from lead because some uses of lead create more gold than other uses of lead."
Not only is this a logical fallacy in terms of proving that you can create jobs by spending money, the simple fact is no use of money is any more successful at creating jobs than any other. Money does not create jobs. It never has. It never will. Money itself is not one of your treasured "renewable resources". You could burn physical cash and nothing of any significance would happen. All of those misprinted, new $100 bills? The cost of printing those was paid to someone. Someone who did (*gasp*) a job. If you had not printed those new $100 bills and instead spent the money elsewhere, you would get the exact same amount of "job" out of it.
Job creation comes from demand and availability of capital.
Only if you're an idiot and want the jobs to be a leech on everyone's taxes. Have money, will throw at all! And as for demand, no government-funded job has ever been in high demand. That's why we get pork bullshit like building a jet in 43 different states, building bridges to your own asshole, recycling centers manned by people instead of machines, a post office filled with ineptitude, etc.
Sustainability comes from using renewable resources, nothing else.
So you understand simple physics! Too bad money is not a renewable resource. Money is a measure of wealth (real world assets) and productivity. A renewable resource is one that you get back later, for free. Productivity is a relatively fixed thing. Once you waste it by having people do pointless jobs, it's gone. You don't magically get man hours credited to some phantom account at the end of every month. If your workers dick about on the factory line, that productivity is gone.
"Demand" as a market force comes from three things: desire, ability to pay, and willingness to pay. Specifically, demand is defined as the quantity of a well defined good or service that people are willing to buy during a particular time period, and increases or decreases as the price falls or rises while all other factors remain constant.
And the public has no desire for more government wage jockeys doing pointless jobs on their dime.
And the public loses their ability to pay with every government-funded job.
Willingness to pay is the same thing as desire.
And when the public loses the desire and willingness to pay for something, the demand falls. And when demand falls, the government bails out GM. Brilliant.
Other interesting questions that science has answered: how magnets work, why we have tides, and how the moon got there.
Science has NOT answered how magnets work, nor how the moon got there, actually. There are several theories about the moon and we'll likely never know for sure. For magnetism, gravity, etc., we mostly understand how they behave, but we're
Roads are an even bigger waste of time. How many hours per year do you waste sitting in traffic? For me, its a lot, and my commute isn't even that long. Remember, there are two ways to ration a scarce commodity like transportation: wait in line, or make people pay. We could add roads until the whole country was covered in them, and it wouldn't help, it would just raise demand. More roads, more people driving. Another option is to make all roads toll roads. You won't find a lot of support for that. The final, and IMHO only workable option is mass transit. It moves more people over the same infrastructure with less overall waiting. Which do you prefer, traffic jams, expensive toll roads, or mass transit?
And of course the other question is, would you rather spend an hour driving in stressful traffic, or an hour and a half sitting on a comfortable train, doing some work or playing on your laptop?
How many hours per year would you waste trying to get somewhere you needed to go if we DIDN'T have roads?
Derp.
Roads and rails are not commodities. They are not subject to rationing.
Physical resources to build and maintain roads and rails are technically a commodity, but these are not in short supply by any measure.
Physical space for roads and railways is a commodity, and believe it or not, the USA has PLENTY of open space. The problem you see is people concentrating into poorly-planned, densely-packed megalopolises. The answer for those cities to put more money into their transportation infrastructure. The answer for people who want to spend less time in traffic, have better-maintained roads, etc. is to move away from the cities, to a place where space is not a scarce commodity.
Mass transit of people in the form of trains will never work when people want to go different places. The US is not Europe. The US is not Japan. The US is fucking huge. To accommodate such a scheme would require replacing nearly every road with rails, and inventing some sort of train that can stop and turn on a dime like a car. Also, it has to be efficient. Daily mass transit will never be a viable option for most people. As for occasional mass transit, we've moved on to superior air travel.
Of course I'd prefer to play games or jerk off instead of driving. But not to the point where my overall trip time would be extended, my overall costs would skyrocket, shit would be less convenient, and my flexibility and freedom would be gone.
America does not want trains for regular transit.
America can not afford trains for regular transit.
Trains are a terribly inefficient, unmanageable, inferior option for regular transit.
Obama spent all the money? Nope. Bush spent all the money. Bush started two wars and increased spending while slashing taxes. The bailout was Bush's baby. You might be able to legitimately claim that Obama hasn't done enough to fix the budget problems, but most people would like the government to create jobs during a recession rather than cut them, don't you think?
Not even all your alt accounts can save this shitty post from the mods, eh spun?
Obama is tracking well ahead (in excess) of Bush Junior in terms of spending.
You can never "create" jobs. You can only move money around from one place to another.
Job creation comes from demand and sustainability.
Sustainability comes from productivity of the workforce, and is hard-capped by physical resources.
Anyone who can tell you where demand comes from would be posting from my crystal palace on the moon.
Yet another reason I'm glad I've always recommended against Linksys to friends and family. Shoddy equipment in the past, and no preparation for the future now.
No preparation for the future now, but they'll be prepared for now in the future.
Then they'll send that preparation back in time and everything will be hunky-dory.
Haven't you seen the pointless brand awareness ads that CISCO runs, showing a classroom in China and one in the US teleconferencing?
Or the giant out-side displays on opposite sides of the planet?
Clearly these ads demonstrate CISCO's mastery of all things time and space. Not only is there 0 latency, the fucking sun is high in the sky in both places at the same fucking time. I wrote a detailed email to every public email address I could find for CISCO, but I only got one drone response. The drone asked me to clarify my concerns, to which I replied "YOUR FUCKING ADVERTISEMENTS SHOW A DISTURBING DISREGARD FOR THE FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF PHYSICS". Still waiting for a response.
The answer here is to train users to have different passwords for each important account (I do, keeping record of them in a local keepass DB, itself protected by a strong password and keyfile on a USB stick, though that is too much hassle for many people).
All that work and in the end you effectively have a single password for everything.
Passwords are like testicles in a devil's threeway - you must never let them touch.
Fair point, the password store is a weak point - but not for remote attackers. They need to get the DB, the key file and the password from my head, most of which requires physical access to me. If someone is that determined to get access to my accounts or impersonate me then they could just kidnap me and be done with it.
Or be a spurned lover OH WAIT THIS IS SLASHDOT.
Would the frog finally notice it's been boiling?
I'm going to have to issue you a cease and desist for that fucking analogy.
That analogy is 100% bullshit. A frog will jump out of a pot of water that's too hot, or too cold, regardless of how gradually you've changed the temperature.
The answer here is to train users to have different passwords for each important account (I do, keeping record of them in a local keepass DB, itself protected by a strong password and keyfile on a USB stick, though that is too much hassle for many people).
All that work and in the end you effectively have a single password for everything.
Passwords are like testicles in a devil's threeway - you must never let them touch.
yea, I guess there is a possibility that Woz is simply lying, but he has never really been an attention whore.
Laughable.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the courts shot that down when Apple tried to claim the desktop?
You're wrong. For a variety of reasons. The chief of which being the fact that you believe courts deciding things once affects all future cases.
Precedent is just a means by which to expedite and normalize justice. It has no actual power. Any judge in any court could completely ignore every single mote of precedence if they felt the desire to (*gasp*) judge the case before them on its own merits. But that would be too much work. It would require critical thinking. And the jackasses and elephants would scream about activist judges.
Also, "case law" is not law.
Fewer features in each major release should mean more time spent fixing bugs. Would hope so, anyway. Firefox 4 beta 10 uses 100% of my CPU almost constantly (on Mac OS X 10.6) and I have no idea what new "feature" is responsible for this.
I've come to realize that it's just firefox.
I was on 3.6 or whatever the latest is, and the damned thing was always 100% CPU. Couldn't even youtube anything.
So I trip out all of the addons, same shit.
So I go to 4 beta 10, same shit.
Fuck it, whatever. Only happens on my work machine anyway.
I think you mean "absotively, posilutely".
Kids these days.
Their sample image is here: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~abl26/copy-background.jpg
Their sample image after recompressing is here: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~abl26/copy-background-recomp.jpg
According to them, the sample recompressed image is saved "with particular quality settings".
So I opened the original image file in GIMP, went to save it as a JPEG, made sure the preview was turned on, and saw nothing.
Of course, this is because I save every jpeg at 1x1, floating point, 100 quality.
So I reduced the quality. After a while, the image appears. A change of 1% (from "82" to "83", for example) can render the message completely visible, and another change can render it completely invisible.
I did a low strength blur (imperceptible to my eyes) on the image, and went through the same experiment, and the message was rendered completely gone.
I suspect that same could be done by adding a small amount of noise, etc.
Yawn.
As even the summary mentions, the technique applies to jpeg-compressed images.
As even the post you replied to mentions, he grabbed a messaged-jpeg via print screen, and recompressed it via jpeg at "60" quality (I'm assuming that's photoshop's "60").
The screenshot provided is in two halves: The top half is the original uncompressed image, and the bottom half is the recomrpessed image. The file format png was chosen for the combined view specifically to avoid compressing the top half and compressing the bottom half a second time.
Nice try at getting fast karma from a first post, but that's not going to work. The screen shot will already be of the compressed image, and will still show signs of re-compressing it.
Nice try at getting fast karma from a first post correction, but I'm still going to correct you.
Anyone copying an image will have no problems. Copy-evident my ass, the file is 100% the same if I grab it and throw it in a torrent.
As for editing to remove watermarks / logos, the recompression will only show the message if your quality is below a certain threshold.
If you edit an image to remove the owner's information, and you see a "THIS IMAGE COPIED FROM SITE.COM" message, just save it at a higher quality.
Inserting the message will be a balance between visibility on the original (you want this low) and sensitivity to recompression (you want this high).
And if someone is insistent on using a low quality jpeg after editing an image you own, they can still easily defeat the scheme by doing an extremely slight blur on the entire image.
So the bottom line is that no, this isn't a copy-evident feature, it's an edit-evident feature, and one that is trivial to circumvent.
King says "HEY Archimedes! Make me a weapon!"
Archimedes says "Okay."
Archimedes goes home and works on some shit for a while.
Two months later he comes back to the King to present his new weapon.
He passes out a dozen mirrors to the guards and has them aim them at the King.
King says "WTF is this shit? It's slightly annoying."
Archimedes says "Exactly! If we were outside in the sun, you'd have to close your eyes! And if we had 10,000 troops, we could set ships on fire! No army would dare approach our coast!"
King says "...during a sunny, hot, dry day. Archimedes you fuckwit, this is the Mediterranean. And they'll be in the ocean. Go build me a mechanical ass fucker so I can punish you with it."
You're an idiot, and your analogy does not fit the situation at all.
Google knowingly, willingly, and intentionally sent Bing the following information:
User searched for diougaslgo
User clicked on twuiagfjd
Bing took that information and incorporated into their algorithm.
After a period of weeks of poisoning the most obscure terms (so the weight of Google's poisoning influence would be high), Google was still only able to get a 7-9% success rate.
Bing is NOT copying Google's search results.
Bing is copying USER activity. USER's can disable this if they wish.
Google claiming some sort of ownership to this information is absurd.
That's like claiming ownership to the idea that a search for "wikipedia", with a follow up click to "wikipedia.org", might mean the user is looking for "wikipedia.org".
Yes, Google's results are helping that along, but Bing is not copying Google's results. Why would they? Google's results are often shit, and Bing is billing itself as a completely different animal. Bing is being damned smart when they use user data. It's the single most valid form of data with regards to "search for x, actually want y". Google simply never looks at this data, because they fear clickfraud. Yes, it's vulnerable to poisoning, but simple throttles can control that. Google only got a 7-9% success rate over a period of weeks of automated poisoning across a bunch of Google IPs, for completely random search terms. What Google did was embarrassing. No idea why they came out and shouted about it like it was an achievement.
As a monopoly the rules are slightly differently.
I would like to see if this falls into the abuse of said monopoly.
I believe it absolutely is an example of an abusive monopoly, and legal action should be taken to split up the giant monopoly into separate companies.
For far too long Google has used their monopoly position in search and advertising to abuse the competition. And now we have a case where Google has come out and admitted to, nay, CHAMPIONED, the fact that they are actively poisoning the search results of their competitors!
Google Search, Google Ads, Google Platforms (Android, Chrome, etc.), and Google Productivity (GMail, Docs, Calendar, etc.) need to be entirely separate entities!
I think they may very well have gotten all libertarian if google had tried, or indeed still does try, to involve the court system.
I think the way most of us, and at the very least I, view this as a simple case of dirty pool (think that may have been in one of the google posts) .
I think what is mostly being missed in all of the talk about this is the fact that if we take Microsoft assertion, that what google did was click fraud, at face value then we are left with the fact that one person manually clicking on a random string can push RIM's home page to the top slot in Bing's results for that string. Google went out of their way to say that they never use user clicks for ranking. I suspect this is because of how absurdly easy such a system is to game.
Google actively poisoned results for 100 random terms (which had little or no results prior to the poisoning).
They did this for a period of weeks.
They did not reveal how many actual clicks they pushed out, but I guarantee you it was automated, it was an absurd number, and it was across a bunch of IPs at Google.
In the end, they got less than a 10% success rate.
If you tried to poison an actual valid term, you'd need astronomically more clicks.
Clickfraud is a problem, but actual clicks are the single best measure of what is valid. Most users do NOT participate in the page rank up/down shit. Spammers (SEOs) do. Most users do NOT value 1000 blog comments that simply contain the first 100 words of the very blog entry you're already at. Spammers (SEOs and bloggers wanting attention) do. Every avenue for improvement you open up to "the community" will be exploited by spammers. Some manual control absolutely has to be at the back end regardless of what you do. And you absolutely have to have some level human monitoring and overrides to catch and control the spammers. Google's little exercise proves that Bing does indeed have at least some automated checks to throttle the influence of potential click fraud. Poisoned en masse for weeks, and less than a 10% success rate on the most obscure terms imaginable. Rather embarrassing for Google.
I have absolutely no idea why Google thought it would be a good idea to throw out this laughable accusation, and offer up a ton of evidence of them poisoning Bing. And I have no idea why they would grasp at the "OMG PRIVACY! IE SENDS DATA TO MS" straw when Google has orders of magnitude more data and uses it in ways that would make Zuckerberg cream his pants if he were able to do the same.