While every single cop involved in such an incident deserves to spend the rest of their lives suffering from lock-in syndrome, you are being a bit hyperbolic: Any of your examples would, in all likelihood, have 'resisted arrest' requiring a serious beatdown with whatever blunt objects came to hand, followed by arrest and a kangaroo court...
There is a long way down when it comes to the depths of potential pig behavior...
I think that you overestimate people. A nontrivial fraction of the human population likes authoritarianism. They aren't being duped, or sleepwalking into it, they are begging for some movement sufficiently authoritarian to allow them to absolve themselves of the painful business of maintaining a personal ego and subsume themselves in some forceful mass-movement. The ideas that diversity is deviance and dissent is treason are self-evident homespun wisdom in many quarters.
Much less likely. Enforcing restrictions on the hardware itself(no tethering, only the carrier's shit-tastic navigation application gets access to the GPS hardware, that sort of thing) is common enough; but that doesn't change the fact that the carrier ultimately controls the network, and the network is substantially more sophisticated than it was back when people were Captain Crunching their way past payphones...(also, unlike payphones, most users are now tied to a unique SIM, or CDMA equivalent, rather than using a public phone.)
This doesn't mean zero hacks, of course, telcoes have fucked up before and they will fuck up again; but a situation where the carrier can, if their packet-inspection gear detects something amiss, kill your service, charge you an ETF, and burn your IMEI across the entire civilized world makes a little recreational phreaking rather less attractive...
For piracy-related weaknesses, I suspect that the monetary value will never be all that high.
To go by the PC experience, there are basically two motives behind cracking DRM on programs: You have the warez scene guys, who do it for the interest and the bragging rights, and tend to produce working(but in no way intended to look uncracked, particularly in areas like the installer, which will often be coated in the livery and distinctive symbols of the group that cracked it) releases that quickly get torrented around and make nobody any money worth noting. Second, you have the more professional set who(sometimes independently, sometimes piggibacking on the efforts of the first group) produce functioning cracked versions, intended to look as legitimate as possible(no flaming skull ascii art in the documentation...), mostly of expensive professional programs, for sale to the unsuspecting or unsophisticated as suspiciously cheap, but hardly free, "OEM" software.
Unless Windows Phone substantially differs from the iPhone or Android, and actually features a lot of available expensive pro stuff, the second group will be largely unmotivated(also, since MS controls the official market, it will be very difficult to fool n00bs into thinking that your cracked copy is a "real" version, even if sideloading is trivial). The first group might spring up, if the Windows Phone market becomes large enough to provide a pool of interested hackers; but(perversely) the sheer ease of cracking, at the present time, will likely bore them. Somebody will probably release a sideloader utility, at some point; but an active warez scene like that of the PC seems less likely, and an active "fake legitimate" scene seems less likely still.
Not to worry: During the last such minimum, the population was too low to make cannibalism a viable reserve food source. In our bold and overpopulated times, we should be able to survive with minimal disruption on what will come to be called the "long pig diet" in a flurry of self-help books and obnoxious mediagenic "doctors" self-promoting Oprah appearances...
Also, if we are sufficiently lucky, the Scandanavian "Black Metal Belt" should move some degrees southward, allowing gene flows between that population and previously isolated genre-concentrations such as the UK punk pool... This should help protect them from excessive inbreeding and the production of incestuous and derivative material...
I suspect, percentage wise, it is fairly safe; but more than a few well-known names have been bitten for noncompliance with respect to busybox utilities... It's hardly a certainty, I'm just surprised that, given the likely bargaining power of the re-badger vs. the random throwaway OEM, that legal is signing off on even modest risk.
You sound awfully bent out of shape, given that what you are responding to is some random internet writer's semi-rhetorical request...
Obviously, only people with a strong personal interest in GPL matters are going to factor that in to their buying decision(along with a halo of people who don't actually care whether a specific distributor is compliant or not; but are basing their buying decision on whether or not a good 3rd-party build is available, since the 1st party builds on a lot of these no-names are going to be pretty dodgy. That halo is, indirectly, going to be influenced by which hardware has had working source cobbled together from somewhere, they just won't much care where...)
If neither of these is an incentive to you, you don't have an incentive. Don't worry, I'm sure that you will survive ignoring a request by somebody on the internet.
Even if the device in question is a completely unaltered build of upstream, public-ally available, sources, anything GPL still has to be either made available with the binary or the binary has to be accompanied by a written offer to provide on request for no more than reasonable duplication costs.
Many of these devices probably don't deviate much from upstream; but I'd be surprised if they are 100% identical(not that that is legally relevant; but if you aren't even shipping a binary based on upstream source, you definitely can't just point to that source and claim to be in compliance). Now, in practice, if given the choice between just checking out from upstream or paying reasonable duplication fees to get a CD with some horribly messy.rar of a slapdash build environment on it, most people are probably just going to go with the former. That doesn't absolve the distributor of the binary of their legal obligations, though.
The area that surprises me is the 'devices produced by small unknown Chinese companies; but rebadged and sold by large American/Japanese/etc. ones' niche.
Given the number of obscure OEMs toiling away on designs based on what appear to be the same set of chipsets, you would expect that a large reseller would have its choice of OEMs, and strong ability to dictate terms. Further, you would expect that the respective legal departments of these re-badgers would absolutely flip out at the idea of incurring substantial risk of copyright infringement risk.
The odds that Sylvania actually produced the hardware being marketed under their name are not huge; but Sylvania is a US-market brand of a pretty big Japanese electronics outfit. If anybody were to sue them about it, there could be serious money on the table.
Coby Electronics Corporation, while it isn't exactly a luxury brand(seen by name in places like CVS pharmacy's electronics aisle, does some OEM work for Radio Shack), is a company with nontrivial size and US presence. Were I their lawyer, I'd be turning a cool shade of purple at the amount of liability we were racking up to score some tiny margins on skeezy wannabe android tablets to be sold to suckers at CVS.
While FOSS guys tend to be nice about it, the penalties in the US for copyright infringement are downright draconian, and that niceness is wholly optional.
I'm not familiar with exactly what the options and price sheet are from Akamai, they aren't nearly as 'consumery' about it as Amazon EC2 is, more of a 'our rep will call you' sort of thing; but one wonders if Apple(who serves huge amounts of audio and video at relatively low prices, and presumably fairly low margins, is cheaping out in a way that Adobe isn't...
Presumably, Akamai uses their geolocation trickery because local deliveries are faster and cheaper. No need to traverse numerous hops, possibly controlled by others prickly about peering, and so forth. However, unless Akamai is secretly denser than a sack of hammers(which seems out of character) they should know that using the massively overloaded system, no matter how local, is going to be worse than using a more distant; but more lightly loaded, one. However, if there is a cost difference between local and distant, that isn't necessarily something that they would offer to their customers for free...
I'm perfectly willing to grant that designing truly good software is hard; but I share your bafflement over why basically all PC OEMs that aren't Apple seem utterly incapable of developing(or buying) even adequate software.
Even with stuff like drivers, where the hardware firm does 99% of the work, and the OEM just has to package(and possibly add their PCI IDs) there is an entirely cottage industry of enthusiasts hacking the vendor's default driver packages to make them work with OEM laptops, because the provided drivers are buggy or deeply obsolete. With things like TPMs and fingerprint readers, they usually seem to purchase 3rd party software; but are too cheap to get that software debranded and given something resembling a coherent interface. You can easily end up looking at 3 or 4 third party companies disparate and heavily branded interfaces just to get the thing initialized.
I really find it puzzling. Even with money, the support of their hardware component vendors, and a desire not to be reduced to competing purely on price with otherwise identical purveyors of wintel boxes, none of them seem to have managed to grow a pet software production team that is even value-neutral, much less 'value-added' relative to a base windows install and stock hardware drivers.
Heck, even good old team linux, which lacks the luxury of picking the components, writing the ACPI implementation, or having much of a budget, generally manages a much more pleasant out-of-box experience than does the vendor, with MS writing the OS, their hardware vendors writing the drivers, and the luxury of picking and choosing components and BIOS features. I just don't understand.
I'm told that the really hardcore astrophotography crew uses CCDs backed with peltier elements or other forms of refrigeration system to keep temperatures stable and low over long shots. Now, since taking up astrophotography is pretty similar to taking up heroin in a "Percentage of income dedicated to primary hobby" sense, I don't think that much helps the 'could use film camera to take long sky exposure, cannot use digital camera for same purpose' relative dabblers...
I wouldn't be so sure: Skype, through its local joint venture "TOM-Skype", has been more than helpful(if not too competent) in assisting the authorities with surveillance. The "TOM-Skype" client is bugged, so it has full access to users' messages before encryption or after decryption, making surveillance trivial regardless of whether or not Skype itself is cracked.
Given the generally supine nature of the main competitor, it would, in fact, be wholly reasonable to suspect that this is a pro-incumbent move.
I think that Dell's problem is that they have fuck all software expertise(I dare anyone to spend a few days with "Dell Controlpoint" and disagree with me here...)
With the exception of some notable fuckups(the E6XXXs as mentioned by various people above), they are pretty good at coming up with hardware that doesn't totally suck at very aggressive price points. However, the moment you want to produce something that isn't a bog-standard PC, laptop, or exactly-what-MS-had-in-mind-for-the-tablet-PC, you need some custom software.
And there is the point at which Dell promptly falls flat. They licenced some shovelware to make their PC more tablety; but didn't manage to either pay the vendor, or do it themselves, to noop out the resolution warnings for the device that it was going to be running on.
As long as you are prepared to run only third party software, suitable to any old PC a dell is a perfectly adequate way of doing it. Dell itself, though, can't be trusted to get the simplest software stuff right...
I suppose that the mini can count itself lucky that it isn't a single-socket mini-tower with internal expansion; but at the price point you hit by not using Xeons. Those have such a bad case of "Road Apple" that they don't even survive infancy...
I wouldn't say that the Mini is " Worst Tech Product of 2010"(particularly as the list seems to flit between being "Worst tech products from companies you've heard of" and "Oh, hey, a bottom-of-the-barrel-no-brand-android-tablet, wow does it suck!").
Spec-wise, the Mini is a complete screwjob, as Minis have been for ages now; but it occupies a niche practically of its own: all the rough PC equivalents are either atom based and a quarter of the cost or something-vaguely-modern-from-intel based and twice the size.
Unless cute 'n tiny is a feature, you shouldn't touch the thing; but that has always been the deal with minis, except for the earliest ones, which were genuinely substantially cheaper than just getting a low end macbook.
If you want to keep the list to "10 worst from companies who should know better", then you might have cause to put the mini in. Once you drag in "random dregs of the chinese android cloneshops", though, I could dig up dozens of worse products in 15 minutes on ebay.
Expecting a company to make what is damn near an Intel reference design work properly after only 27 BIOS updates(and counting, it was 24 only weeks ago) is cruel and unrealistic. Some people just aren't satisfied with anything(or, like our network manager, satisfied with anything related to his E6400, which he deep-sixed for his prior laptop, despite the significant spec bump...)
As I noted there this form factor has nothing to do with intel particularly, nor did they come up with it.
I just strongly object to the use of an identical connector for two completely different, non-interoperable protocols. Were it some chintzy once-off by a bottom feeding netbook monger, trying to pinch every last nickel off production costs, it would be understandable, if distasteful; but the fact that they've gone and made a standard out of it, without adding so much as a cheap keying change to the mSATA version of the mini PCIe connector, pisses me off.
My displeasure isn't Intel specific; but aimed at the unmodified reuse of a connector intended for a completely different protocol. It's sloppy and user hostile.
So, in that case, the wikileaks cable leak had virtually no effect; because the contents of the cable were already public knowledge?
(I'm not picking on you here, just ranting about a much broader trend that really annoys me in media coverage of wikileaks' activity):
Either wikileaks is boring, boring, just piling on a few documents containing what everyone already knows(in which case they should barely be worthy of mention, much less a giagantic multinational public/private campaign against them) or they are shaking things up with explosive new information and letting the chips fall where they may, in the service of full disclosure.
If the former, any claims of "harm" are ludicrous, since they are simply telling people what they already know. If the latter, claims of "harm" are at least possible; but they are also making material changes in the availability of information about the workings of governments to people, which is pretty arguably a good.
What pisses me off is that the dominant narrative among the old media(particularly the ones not getting to collaborate on the stories derived from wikileaks material) is that they are simultaneously totally banal and adding absolutely nothing to the conversation and personally publishing the name and address of every covert agent and american collaborator in hostile locations, and thus a menace. Put down the doublethink and decide, guys.
Either they are banal, in which case shut up about them, or they are putting new information on the table, in which case you should start justifying, yesterday, why that information had to be leaked to the people, rather than simply provided; but they can't be both banal and threatening.
Are we winning the war on spam, or are spammers(and their comparatively low returns) just being priced out of the botnet market by more lucrative cybercriminals, the DDoS extortion set, espionage agents public and private, various ideological axe grinders?
Given the fairly low-effort, fairly low-return nature of spamming, I imagine that it is sort of the botnet equivalent of a "screensaver" mode. More valuable than doing nothing; but priced out of the market once a more serious set of criminals comes along(especially now that there are relatively few fully legal spamming locations. This isn't the old days when the world's spam king was some American prick with multiple T1s running to his house, sending spam quite openly right out of his home jurisdiction...)
While I hardly trust governments, not to moralize when it suits their purposes, it seems very out of character for them to moralize quietly...
Only the most informal(or allegedly-terrorism-related) pressure avoids leaving some sort of court record. Obscenity trials, subpoenas for J. Pedophile's buying history, and the like all leave court records. Informal pressure doesn't necessarily leave any documentary record; but most state AGs or DOJ officials only waste their time on smut peddlers if either A) they are a card-carrying nutjob for jesus or B) they wish to burnish their credentials among that demographic in preparation for their run for Governor/President/AG/whatever...
If a state attorney general were behind this, I'd expect a steady stream of press releases crowing about their success in protecting the children from pedophile filth. No PR gain if nobody knows that it is you. At the federal level, team jesus already thinks that the president is a muslin, communist, fascist, love child of Malcom X and Hitler, so any strategy that attempts to defang them with a few petty obscenity crackdowns, at the cost of pissing off every last liberal democrat who hasn't already realized that they elected a republican, seems absurdly tone-deaf.
The state would not hesitate to apply pressure if they felt it to be in their interest; but their reasons for doing so so quietly seem a lot weaker...
It's too bad: If Lot's daughters had had access to the valuable moral contained in the Dead Kennedy's classic Too Drunk to Fuck none of this would have ever happened...
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While every single cop involved in such an incident deserves to spend the rest of their lives suffering from lock-in syndrome, you are being a bit hyperbolic: Any of your examples would, in all likelihood, have 'resisted arrest' requiring a serious beatdown with whatever blunt objects came to hand, followed by arrest and a kangaroo court...
There is a long way down when it comes to the depths of potential pig behavior...
I think that you overestimate people. A nontrivial fraction of the human population likes authoritarianism. They aren't being duped, or sleepwalking into it, they are begging for some movement sufficiently authoritarian to allow them to absolve themselves of the painful business of maintaining a personal ego and subsume themselves in some forceful mass-movement. The ideas that diversity is deviance and dissent is treason are self-evident homespun wisdom in many quarters.
Much less likely. Enforcing restrictions on the hardware itself(no tethering, only the carrier's shit-tastic navigation application gets access to the GPS hardware, that sort of thing) is common enough; but that doesn't change the fact that the carrier ultimately controls the network, and the network is substantially more sophisticated than it was back when people were Captain Crunching their way past payphones...(also, unlike payphones, most users are now tied to a unique SIM, or CDMA equivalent, rather than using a public phone.)
This doesn't mean zero hacks, of course, telcoes have fucked up before and they will fuck up again; but a situation where the carrier can, if their packet-inspection gear detects something amiss, kill your service, charge you an ETF, and burn your IMEI across the entire civilized world makes a little recreational phreaking rather less attractive...
For piracy-related weaknesses, I suspect that the monetary value will never be all that high.
To go by the PC experience, there are basically two motives behind cracking DRM on programs: You have the warez scene guys, who do it for the interest and the bragging rights, and tend to produce working(but in no way intended to look uncracked, particularly in areas like the installer, which will often be coated in the livery and distinctive symbols of the group that cracked it) releases that quickly get torrented around and make nobody any money worth noting. Second, you have the more professional set who(sometimes independently, sometimes piggibacking on the efforts of the first group) produce functioning cracked versions, intended to look as legitimate as possible(no flaming skull ascii art in the documentation...), mostly of expensive professional programs, for sale to the unsuspecting or unsophisticated as suspiciously cheap, but hardly free, "OEM" software.
Unless Windows Phone substantially differs from the iPhone or Android, and actually features a lot of available expensive pro stuff, the second group will be largely unmotivated(also, since MS controls the official market, it will be very difficult to fool n00bs into thinking that your cracked copy is a "real" version, even if sideloading is trivial). The first group might spring up, if the Windows Phone market becomes large enough to provide a pool of interested hackers; but(perversely) the sheer ease of cracking, at the present time, will likely bore them. Somebody will probably release a sideloader utility, at some point; but an active warez scene like that of the PC seems less likely, and an active "fake legitimate" scene seems less likely still.
Not to worry: During the last such minimum, the population was too low to make cannibalism a viable reserve food source. In our bold and overpopulated times, we should be able to survive with minimal disruption on what will come to be called the "long pig diet" in a flurry of self-help books and obnoxious mediagenic "doctors" self-promoting Oprah appearances...
Also, if we are sufficiently lucky, the Scandanavian "Black Metal Belt" should move some degrees southward, allowing gene flows between that population and previously isolated genre-concentrations such as the UK punk pool... This should help protect them from excessive inbreeding and the production of incestuous and derivative material...
I suspect, percentage wise, it is fairly safe; but more than a few well-known names have been bitten for noncompliance with respect to busybox utilities... It's hardly a certainty, I'm just surprised that, given the likely bargaining power of the re-badger vs. the random throwaway OEM, that legal is signing off on even modest risk.
You sound awfully bent out of shape, given that what you are responding to is some random internet writer's semi-rhetorical request...
Obviously, only people with a strong personal interest in GPL matters are going to factor that in to their buying decision(along with a halo of people who don't actually care whether a specific distributor is compliant or not; but are basing their buying decision on whether or not a good 3rd-party build is available, since the 1st party builds on a lot of these no-names are going to be pretty dodgy. That halo is, indirectly, going to be influenced by which hardware has had working source cobbled together from somewhere, they just won't much care where...)
If neither of these is an incentive to you, you don't have an incentive. Don't worry, I'm sure that you will survive ignoring a request by somebody on the internet.
Even if the device in question is a completely unaltered build of upstream, public-ally available, sources, anything GPL still has to be either made available with the binary or the binary has to be accompanied by a written offer to provide on request for no more than reasonable duplication costs.
.rar of a slapdash build environment on it, most people are probably just going to go with the former. That doesn't absolve the distributor of the binary of their legal obligations, though.
Many of these devices probably don't deviate much from upstream; but I'd be surprised if they are 100% identical(not that that is legally relevant; but if you aren't even shipping a binary based on upstream source, you definitely can't just point to that source and claim to be in compliance). Now, in practice, if given the choice between just checking out from upstream or paying reasonable duplication fees to get a CD with some horribly messy
The area that surprises me is the 'devices produced by small unknown Chinese companies; but rebadged and sold by large American/Japanese/etc. ones' niche.
Given the number of obscure OEMs toiling away on designs based on what appear to be the same set of chipsets, you would expect that a large reseller would have its choice of OEMs, and strong ability to dictate terms. Further, you would expect that the respective legal departments of these re-badgers would absolutely flip out at the idea of incurring substantial risk of copyright infringement risk.
The odds that Sylvania actually produced the hardware being marketed under their name are not huge; but Sylvania is a US-market brand of a pretty big Japanese electronics outfit. If anybody were to sue them about it, there could be serious money on the table.
Coby Electronics Corporation, while it isn't exactly a luxury brand(seen by name in places like CVS pharmacy's electronics aisle, does some OEM work for Radio Shack), is a company with nontrivial size and US presence. Were I their lawyer, I'd be turning a cool shade of purple at the amount of liability we were racking up to score some tiny margins on skeezy wannabe android tablets to be sold to suckers at CVS.
While FOSS guys tend to be nice about it, the penalties in the US for copyright infringement are downright draconian, and that niceness is wholly optional.
I'm not familiar with exactly what the options and price sheet are from Akamai, they aren't nearly as 'consumery' about it as Amazon EC2 is, more of a 'our rep will call you' sort of thing; but one wonders if Apple(who serves huge amounts of audio and video at relatively low prices, and presumably fairly low margins, is cheaping out in a way that Adobe isn't...
Presumably, Akamai uses their geolocation trickery because local deliveries are faster and cheaper. No need to traverse numerous hops, possibly controlled by others prickly about peering, and so forth. However, unless Akamai is secretly denser than a sack of hammers(which seems out of character) they should know that using the massively overloaded system, no matter how local, is going to be worse than using a more distant; but more lightly loaded, one. However, if there is a cost difference between local and distant, that isn't necessarily something that they would offer to their customers for free...
I'm perfectly willing to grant that designing truly good software is hard; but I share your bafflement over why basically all PC OEMs that aren't Apple seem utterly incapable of developing(or buying) even adequate software.
Even with stuff like drivers, where the hardware firm does 99% of the work, and the OEM just has to package(and possibly add their PCI IDs) there is an entirely cottage industry of enthusiasts hacking the vendor's default driver packages to make them work with OEM laptops, because the provided drivers are buggy or deeply obsolete. With things like TPMs and fingerprint readers, they usually seem to purchase 3rd party software; but are too cheap to get that software debranded and given something resembling a coherent interface. You can easily end up looking at 3 or 4 third party companies disparate and heavily branded interfaces just to get the thing initialized.
I really find it puzzling. Even with money, the support of their hardware component vendors, and a desire not to be reduced to competing purely on price with otherwise identical purveyors of wintel boxes, none of them seem to have managed to grow a pet software production team that is even value-neutral, much less 'value-added' relative to a base windows install and stock hardware drivers.
Heck, even good old team linux, which lacks the luxury of picking the components, writing the ACPI implementation, or having much of a budget, generally manages a much more pleasant out-of-box experience than does the vendor, with MS writing the OS, their hardware vendors writing the drivers, and the luxury of picking and choosing components and BIOS features. I just don't understand.
Console gamers are not our brethren. They are The Unclean Ones.
I'm told that the really hardcore astrophotography crew uses CCDs backed with peltier elements or other forms of refrigeration system to keep temperatures stable and low over long shots. Now, since taking up astrophotography is pretty similar to taking up heroin in a "Percentage of income dedicated to primary hobby" sense, I don't think that much helps the 'could use film camera to take long sky exposure, cannot use digital camera for same purpose' relative dabblers...
I wouldn't be so sure: Skype, through its local joint venture "TOM-Skype", has been more than helpful(if not too competent) in assisting the authorities with surveillance. The "TOM-Skype" client is bugged, so it has full access to users' messages before encryption or after decryption, making surveillance trivial regardless of whether or not Skype itself is cracked.
Given the generally supine nature of the main competitor, it would, in fact, be wholly reasonable to suspect that this is a pro-incumbent move.
I think that Dell's problem is that they have fuck all software expertise(I dare anyone to spend a few days with "Dell Controlpoint" and disagree with me here...)
With the exception of some notable fuckups(the E6XXXs as mentioned by various people above), they are pretty good at coming up with hardware that doesn't totally suck at very aggressive price points. However, the moment you want to produce something that isn't a bog-standard PC, laptop, or exactly-what-MS-had-in-mind-for-the-tablet-PC, you need some custom software.
And there is the point at which Dell promptly falls flat. They licenced some shovelware to make their PC more tablety; but didn't manage to either pay the vendor, or do it themselves, to noop out the resolution warnings for the device that it was going to be running on.
As long as you are prepared to run only third party software, suitable to any old PC a dell is a perfectly adequate way of doing it. Dell itself, though, can't be trusted to get the simplest software stuff right...
I suppose that the mini can count itself lucky that it isn't a single-socket mini-tower with internal expansion; but at the price point you hit by not using Xeons. Those have such a bad case of "Road Apple" that they don't even survive infancy...
I wouldn't say that the Mini is " Worst Tech Product of 2010"(particularly as the list seems to flit between being "Worst tech products from companies you've heard of" and "Oh, hey, a bottom-of-the-barrel-no-brand-android-tablet, wow does it suck!").
Spec-wise, the Mini is a complete screwjob, as Minis have been for ages now; but it occupies a niche practically of its own: all the rough PC equivalents are either atom based and a quarter of the cost or something-vaguely-modern-from-intel based and twice the size.
Unless cute 'n tiny is a feature, you shouldn't touch the thing; but that has always been the deal with minis, except for the earliest ones, which were genuinely substantially cheaper than just getting a low end macbook.
If you want to keep the list to "10 worst from companies who should know better", then you might have cause to put the mini in. Once you drag in "random dregs of the chinese android cloneshops", though, I could dig up dozens of worse products in 15 minutes on ebay.
I'm not sure how you could be so mean...
Expecting a company to make what is damn near an Intel reference design work properly after only 27 BIOS updates(and counting, it was 24 only weeks ago) is cruel and unrealistic. Some people just aren't satisfied with anything(or, like our network manager, satisfied with anything related to his E6400, which he deep-sixed for his prior laptop, despite the significant spec bump...)
As I noted there this form factor has nothing to do with intel particularly, nor did they come up with it.
I just strongly object to the use of an identical connector for two completely different, non-interoperable protocols. Were it some chintzy once-off by a bottom feeding netbook monger, trying to pinch every last nickel off production costs, it would be understandable, if distasteful; but the fact that they've gone and made a standard out of it, without adding so much as a cheap keying change to the mSATA version of the mini PCIe connector, pisses me off.
My displeasure isn't Intel specific; but aimed at the unmodified reuse of a connector intended for a completely different protocol. It's sloppy and user hostile.
Spammer's lipids could be converted into biofuels...
So, in that case, the wikileaks cable leak had virtually no effect; because the contents of the cable were already public knowledge?
(I'm not picking on you here, just ranting about a much broader trend that really annoys me in media coverage of wikileaks' activity):
Either wikileaks is boring, boring, just piling on a few documents containing what everyone already knows(in which case they should barely be worthy of mention, much less a giagantic multinational public/private campaign against them) or they are shaking things up with explosive new information and letting the chips fall where they may, in the service of full disclosure.
If the former, any claims of "harm" are ludicrous, since they are simply telling people what they already know. If the latter, claims of "harm" are at least possible; but they are also making material changes in the availability of information about the workings of governments to people, which is pretty arguably a good.
What pisses me off is that the dominant narrative among the old media(particularly the ones not getting to collaborate on the stories derived from wikileaks material) is that they are simultaneously totally banal and adding absolutely nothing to the conversation and personally publishing the name and address of every covert agent and american collaborator in hostile locations, and thus a menace. Put down the doublethink and decide, guys.
Either they are banal, in which case shut up about them, or they are putting new information on the table, in which case you should start justifying, yesterday, why that information had to be leaked to the people, rather than simply provided; but they can't be both banal and threatening.
Have you booked your holiday yet? Cambodia is very nice this time of year...
Are we winning the war on spam, or are spammers(and their comparatively low returns) just being priced out of the botnet market by more lucrative cybercriminals, the DDoS extortion set, espionage agents public and private, various ideological axe grinders?
Given the fairly low-effort, fairly low-return nature of spamming, I imagine that it is sort of the botnet equivalent of a "screensaver" mode. More valuable than doing nothing; but priced out of the market once a more serious set of criminals comes along(especially now that there are relatively few fully legal spamming locations. This isn't the old days when the world's spam king was some American prick with multiple T1s running to his house, sending spam quite openly right out of his home jurisdiction...)
While I hardly trust governments, not to moralize when it suits their purposes, it seems very out of character for them to moralize quietly...
Only the most informal(or allegedly-terrorism-related) pressure avoids leaving some sort of court record. Obscenity trials, subpoenas for J. Pedophile's buying history, and the like all leave court records. Informal pressure doesn't necessarily leave any documentary record; but most state AGs or DOJ officials only waste their time on smut peddlers if either A) they are a card-carrying nutjob for jesus or B) they wish to burnish their credentials among that demographic in preparation for their run for Governor/President/AG/whatever...
If a state attorney general were behind this, I'd expect a steady stream of press releases crowing about their success in protecting the children from pedophile filth. No PR gain if nobody knows that it is you. At the federal level, team jesus already thinks that the president is a muslin, communist, fascist, love child of Malcom X and Hitler, so any strategy that attempts to defang them with a few petty obscenity crackdowns, at the cost of pissing off every last liberal democrat who hasn't already realized that they elected a republican, seems absurdly tone-deaf.
The state would not hesitate to apply pressure if they felt it to be in their interest; but their reasons for doing so so quietly seem a lot weaker...
It's too bad: If Lot's daughters had had access to the valuable moral contained in the Dead Kennedy's classic Too Drunk to Fuck none of this would have ever happened...