What is the benefit to shareholders of a tech company when the company gets bought by another company because it couldn't make it's own products a success? Yahoo is already a last-gen company but how will it help it to be bought by a company that hasn't had a really successful product in the last-gen space let alone the current generation?
If Microsoft buys Yahoo I'll wait until I see the spike where all the stupid people buy in and then sell. Microsoft can't make their own stuff work so they're going to use Yahoo as a crutch until they both go down the crapper.
Both Yahoo and Microsoft need a major infusion of young blood and new ideas. They can't offer each other that.
If you see a domain owned by someone else and you sign up for one of these programs that lets you swoop in and steal it the moment that it is available and then send an email offering to sell it back for large sums of money then that is theft and blackmail.
If you leave your front door unlocked and I pay some kid to come into your house and steal stuff for me then does that make it my stuff? How about if I'm a network admin and I see that you left embarrassing photos of yourself on my system - can I then just charge you a large sum of money not to write your name on the photos and post them on Usenet?
I can only imagine you must be one of the vultures that steal from other people rather than creating any real value on your own. Such people are scum no better than any other thief. Any idiot knows how to steal stuff but most of us have morals and don't do it.
Maybe you missed the point about the registar purposely blocking my access. Not sending me any warning that it was about to expire is bad enough but they made it so I couldn't login to manage my domains or see when it'd expire via usual means (whois).
Overall pretty shitty business practices. Obviously you've never dealt with any issues more complicated than the kiddy pool or you'd know that it isn't as simple as you make out. You can't just register a domain that is already registered with another registar when it's locked and can't be unlocked.
The problem is that no matter how secure your network is if you allow people that are less secure than you to connect to your network then you're security is as weak as their security. The weakest link is always the place of failure. If some dumbass running Windows with 40 different key loggers infecting their system connects to your secure website and enters their username and password then there is nothing you can really do to repair that damage. At that point the account is owned by whomever is collecting that information. Obviously the bank can't be held accountable for that account if the customer is going to make no effort to protect themselves.
No security module is going to protect user's accounts so long as the user still uses an insecure OS that hasn't even been properly updated since it was installed and which is usually infected by loads of crappy viral ware.
At least they bought it fairly. I hate the bastards that stake out your working domains and if you're a day late re-registering them they grab the domains up and try to blackmail you into buying them back for ridiculous amounts of money. I've actually thought about physically assaulting one of these bastards that targeted a group of my sites registered through a register that decided to block my access to see when the domains expired, because I canceled an unrelated service with them, and didn't send any kind of warning email. (I wonder if I could sue the register too.)
I always think of it as making it hard enough that someone else is a more rewarding target. All you have to do is have better security than anyone else of an equivalent level of payout.
Of course there are always some people, like myself, that do it just for the challenge. Those people will opt for the harder challenge just to prove something to themselves. As a teenager I kept trying to find the hardest places to break into, shoplift from, etc just to see if I could do it. (As well as doing things like reverse shoplifting to return stuff I'd stolen.) Usually this type of person isn't interested in harming the victim though.
I think it should be done at the video driver level probably. All you'd need to do was create a filter between the real video driver and the rest of the OS. I'd be surprised if nobody offers a solution for people with these kind of medical conditions. You couldn't stop all dangers, someone trying to avoid the filters could still figure out how to bypass them, but you could detect common issues such as strobbing sections of the screen.
It's not even new. I remember a virus in about the mid 90s that would attempt to cause the victim to have a seizure in the same manner. Also there was some Japanese cartoon that accidentally caused seizures in som watchers and it was popular for a while for people to post clips of the offending scenes on their websites. Not much a hack.
I am surprised that sufferers of this condition can't get filtering software for their computer though that analyzes what is happening on the screen and blacks out, or otherwise makes safe, dangerous content. Looking for strobes should be a fairly easy thing. Hell, I'd be surprised if a lot of ad banners don't cause seizures.
I think the only working model is the concept of security in layers. The more layers an attacker has to dig through to compromise a systems security the more secure that system is. Biometrics alone are pretty weak. Passwords alone are pretty weak. Use them together and they're a little less weak. The biggest obstacle is the user. Will they put up with multiple security checks? Can they remember a good password? Will they notice where they're leaving behind fingerprints or if someone is trying to record their voice?
In the end you have to be realistic with your expectations for any security system. We lock our front door when we leave our house but we all know that someone that wants to get in can still get in if they want to try hard enough. When you lay in bed at night you have no way to be sure that a stranger hasn't secretly entered your home and is waiting to cut your throat in the dark. Yet we make a bigger deal over how secure access to your bank account and other sensitive information is. At some point you just have to say enough and go on with your life.
In the day that may have been true but today you don't really need to have anything to do with the RIAA if you're actually talented. Do some gigs, put videos on YouTube and similar sites, offer BitTorrent downloads of your music for a nominal fee and you're in business.
The ones that need the big labels are those who aren't really that good and need someone to polish them up and convince teenage girls that they're great. Even they could probably get a better deal if they shopped around a bit. Surely there are others with the experience needed that aren't part of a major record company.
Or they could just use their heads and polish themselves up. Maybe use some feedback from folks on the Internet.
Anyway I won't buy music from Walmart no matter what the price because they censor their cds without putting labels explaining this on the cd cases.
Evil is the key. Microsoft earns hate because it is evil. It forces crappy products onto consumers with it's monopoly powers, has horrible support, and is overpriced. For me at least it's really because of the bad support. If I had to use their products but patches were easy to get at no additional cost I'd survive. I switched to Linux as my primary OS more than a decade ago after Microsoft gave me the run around for replacing a damaged disk my new copy of Windows had in the box. They sent me to the vendor and the vendor sent me to Microsoft. Back and forth over and over - oh, and Microsoft's support line charged by the minute. Over the years I've found lots of other reasons to dislike Microsoft but that was the straw that broke the camels back in my case.
When Apple and Google start acting like that then maybe I'll hate them too.
Who was trying for the moral higher ground? The point was that very few people feel a need to help someone that has more than them. If you want to ask for help then don't advertise that you have it better than most of the people that you're asking for help. It's just not an intelligent way to go about the process.
It's like asking for handouts at the soup kitchen while decked out in a lot of expensive jewelry.
At least I wouldn't advertise that I was upper middle class. That makes it really hard to get much sympathy from those of us that were born to just plain poor parents and had to drag our asses up to middle class with nobody to help us. If you're only a few thousand short then I agree with the poster - get a job. Leave the scholarship money for people that need it to go to ANY college.
Not that it helps you but I think the government should foot the bill for all education needed to prepare people for today's workforce. An adequate workforce and intelligent voters is why we pay for public education. Times have changed and at least a bachelors degree is required to meet those requirements today so the public school system should change to cover that. Maybe not to send everyone to MIT but I think guaranteeing the chance to get a college education is a good idea. I'd go so far as to offer higher degrees, at the governments cost, to people going into medicine, teaching, science, and engineering as I think those fields are most useful to our society.
Sure that's the real problem but what can we do about it besides find tech fixes? I work 40+ hours a week, school + homework is another 40 hours a week, and I have a wife and family to spend time with. There just aren't enough hours in the day to squeeze everything in. Even with only sleeping three hours a night it's hard to fit it all in. Luckily I've hardly slept for the past 15 years (I'm 30 now) so it's not that rough on me. For people that need more sleep it must be really hard.
I don't fall asleep at work, school, or in the car but if I try to watch tv with my family I tend to fall asleep a lot. Not sure how much of that is because of lack of sleep and how much is because of the quality of television programming.:)
Your iPhone is more pimp than my computer of not to many years ago was. Sure for small devices small code matters a bit more than for full PCs but it doesn't matter near as much as it used to.
It's better for the movie companies to have Bluray cracked anyway. I am a huge movie person but I mostly had stopped buying DVDs while I waited for Bluray to get cracked. I wasn't buying any movies until it was cracked because I want to be able to make backups and shift the movies to my computer hdd for playback. Now I can move forward and buy Bluray movies.
I'm sure I'm not the only one that doesn't want to be told what they can do with the media they buy.
For that matter, what about people like m that leave bots running to collect useful information? Some of them even download files as they go so I could very well have illegal content on my system somewhere and have no idea it's there. It's all to easy to follow hyperlinks without meaning to and even to download content without knowing what it is. Even if you deleted it as soon as you saw what it was they could claim you'd downloaded and viewed it.
That's part of the reason I'm considering putting my Internet search and indexing projects into a virtual machine that uses an encrypted hdd and memory. There is to much risk that simply trying to find better methods to search the Internet could get horrible charges brought against us coders.
Until the program uses up all your memory and then drags your entire computer into lag hell. FF3 is an improvement over FF2 in this. Overall FF3 is having a lot less of a negative impact. The single biggest problem I have with web browsing isn't the browser though - it's Flash. Flash, and a few other plugin's, leak tons of memory and hog CPU resources when not even doing anything. This is really bad in Linux.
Other than the Flash issue FF2 and FF3 are both way faster, and less intensive, than IE7 and heck they can even properly render a page.
Nobody should run anti-virus software. It doesn't really work most of the time, it fscks up your computer, and the real problem could be solved just by some user education and smart computing behavior. Servers that handle file transfers are the ones that should do virus scanning. A trusted source for getting files should be trustworthy in every regard - good security, virus scanning, etc.
Battle Bots is awesome but I agree. It'd be much more impressive if they forced the bots to fend for themselves.
I always wanted to see a show that combined Battle Bots and Junkyard Wars too. You have one day and one garbage dump to put together the coolest bot you can and then have them tear each other apart. Otherwise it can become to much a competition of who can spend the most money.
I'm surprised the military doesn't sponsor these kinds of shows. It can only lead to more interest and more experience in building mechanized combat bots.
So long as nothing gets deleted it doesn't really matter if moderators are stupid. I'd suggest making it so users can choose to ignore given moderators if they want to.
I'd also suggest a tree of authority for moderators so that all moderations get passed up the line to someone to approve or disapprove. Amy is master moderator for the whole of Wikipedia. Bob is master moderator for Programming. Cindy is master moderator for Java. Debie, Ellen, and Frank are normal moderators that make decisions on some changes to some Java articles. Cindy can't actually make any moderations herself but she can pass or veto the mods made by Debie, Ellen, and Frank. Bob can do the same for what Cindy passes through. Amy can do the same for what Bob passes through. The idea is to screen out bad mods. In most cases master mods would just rubber stamp what gets passed to them but they would have the chance not to. Something similar as to how the Linux kernel is developed. Obviously mods and master mods that passed stuff up that got vetoed a lot might be subject to removal.
I might even go so far as to offer different trees of authority that could be chosen by the user so that if they don't like the paid moderators they could choose an alternate. Maybe alternate paid mods or even community volunteers. For instance, right-wing Christians might choose an authority that was in line with their morals so that the encyclopedia's default view would be inline with what they want to teach their children.
You'd moderator specific changes. Not a very hard thing to do with a text document. Just highlight the diff'd data for specific updates so that it could be moderated. Obviously you'd need some sort of moderation view but that'd be no big deal. It'd be similar to an edit view as opposed to a normal view.
The real discussion would come from how you'd show an edited chunk that was an edit of one you didn't want to see by someone you did want to see. I'd suggest having the latest edit be the one that counts in that case.
Hdd space is cheap so the only problem with allowing anything and everything is in making it easy to sort. Making a Slashdot-like rating system would help quite a bit. Users could then mod stuff up and down and flag certain types of content. Users with high karma would get an auto flag to the top.
On top of that I'd add paid moderators and experts to enter content and double check that no users cheat the karma/mod system into letting them inappropriately get material miscategorized or misrated.
Nothing has to be deleted. Just make it easy for users to sort through. If someone wants to see every stupid thing anyone has put in then let them. If someone wants to see only expert content then let them. Isn't that the whole point of allowing every user to customize their own experience? Just make the default something reasonable such as all expert content and all content of a reasonably high karma/mod value.
A loan can be difficult to get especially if you're trying a business that isn't just a copy of an already established business. Investors have the negative impact of wanting a large chunk of your business which can be daunting. Either way, if the business doesn't work out you can be left in a worse place than when you started.
I think our society, overall, no longer takes enough risks. Risk is what enables us to leap forward.
Slashdot Mirror
What is the benefit to shareholders of a tech company when the company gets bought by another company because it couldn't make it's own products a success? Yahoo is already a last-gen company but how will it help it to be bought by a company that hasn't had a really successful product in the last-gen space let alone the current generation?
If Microsoft buys Yahoo I'll wait until I see the spike where all the stupid people buy in and then sell. Microsoft can't make their own stuff work so they're going to use Yahoo as a crutch until they both go down the crapper.
Both Yahoo and Microsoft need a major infusion of young blood and new ideas. They can't offer each other that.
If you see a domain owned by someone else and you sign up for one of these programs that lets you swoop in and steal it the moment that it is available and then send an email offering to sell it back for large sums of money then that is theft and blackmail.
If you leave your front door unlocked and I pay some kid to come into your house and steal stuff for me then does that make it my stuff? How about if I'm a network admin and I see that you left embarrassing photos of yourself on my system - can I then just charge you a large sum of money not to write your name on the photos and post them on Usenet?
I can only imagine you must be one of the vultures that steal from other people rather than creating any real value on your own. Such people are scum no better than any other thief. Any idiot knows how to steal stuff but most of us have morals and don't do it.
Maybe you missed the point about the registar purposely blocking my access. Not sending me any warning that it was about to expire is bad enough but they made it so I couldn't login to manage my domains or see when it'd expire via usual means (whois).
Overall pretty shitty business practices. Obviously you've never dealt with any issues more complicated than the kiddy pool or you'd know that it isn't as simple as you make out. You can't just register a domain that is already registered with another registar when it's locked and can't be unlocked.
The problem is that no matter how secure your network is if you allow people that are less secure than you to connect to your network then you're security is as weak as their security. The weakest link is always the place of failure. If some dumbass running Windows with 40 different key loggers infecting their system connects to your secure website and enters their username and password then there is nothing you can really do to repair that damage. At that point the account is owned by whomever is collecting that information. Obviously the bank can't be held accountable for that account if the customer is going to make no effort to protect themselves.
No security module is going to protect user's accounts so long as the user still uses an insecure OS that hasn't even been properly updated since it was installed and which is usually infected by loads of crappy viral ware.
At least they bought it fairly. I hate the bastards that stake out your working domains and if you're a day late re-registering them they grab the domains up and try to blackmail you into buying them back for ridiculous amounts of money. I've actually thought about physically assaulting one of these bastards that targeted a group of my sites registered through a register that decided to block my access to see when the domains expired, because I canceled an unrelated service with them, and didn't send any kind of warning email. (I wonder if I could sue the register too.)
I always think of it as making it hard enough that someone else is a more rewarding target. All you have to do is have better security than anyone else of an equivalent level of payout.
Of course there are always some people, like myself, that do it just for the challenge. Those people will opt for the harder challenge just to prove something to themselves. As a teenager I kept trying to find the hardest places to break into, shoplift from, etc just to see if I could do it. (As well as doing things like reverse shoplifting to return stuff I'd stolen.) Usually this type of person isn't interested in harming the victim though.
I think it should be done at the video driver level probably. All you'd need to do was create a filter between the real video driver and the rest of the OS. I'd be surprised if nobody offers a solution for people with these kind of medical conditions. You couldn't stop all dangers, someone trying to avoid the filters could still figure out how to bypass them, but you could detect common issues such as strobbing sections of the screen.
It's not even new. I remember a virus in about the mid 90s that would attempt to cause the victim to have a seizure in the same manner. Also there was some Japanese cartoon that accidentally caused seizures in som watchers and it was popular for a while for people to post clips of the offending scenes on their websites. Not much a hack.
I am surprised that sufferers of this condition can't get filtering software for their computer though that analyzes what is happening on the screen and blacks out, or otherwise makes safe, dangerous content. Looking for strobes should be a fairly easy thing. Hell, I'd be surprised if a lot of ad banners don't cause seizures.
I think the only working model is the concept of security in layers. The more layers an attacker has to dig through to compromise a systems security the more secure that system is. Biometrics alone are pretty weak. Passwords alone are pretty weak. Use them together and they're a little less weak. The biggest obstacle is the user. Will they put up with multiple security checks? Can they remember a good password? Will they notice where they're leaving behind fingerprints or if someone is trying to record their voice?
In the end you have to be realistic with your expectations for any security system. We lock our front door when we leave our house but we all know that someone that wants to get in can still get in if they want to try hard enough. When you lay in bed at night you have no way to be sure that a stranger hasn't secretly entered your home and is waiting to cut your throat in the dark. Yet we make a bigger deal over how secure access to your bank account and other sensitive information is. At some point you just have to say enough and go on with your life.
In the day that may have been true but today you don't really need to have anything to do with the RIAA if you're actually talented. Do some gigs, put videos on YouTube and similar sites, offer BitTorrent downloads of your music for a nominal fee and you're in business.
The ones that need the big labels are those who aren't really that good and need someone to polish them up and convince teenage girls that they're great. Even they could probably get a better deal if they shopped around a bit. Surely there are others with the experience needed that aren't part of a major record company.
Or they could just use their heads and polish themselves up. Maybe use some feedback from folks on the Internet.
Anyway I won't buy music from Walmart no matter what the price because they censor their cds without putting labels explaining this on the cd cases.
Evil is the key. Microsoft earns hate because it is evil. It forces crappy products onto consumers with it's monopoly powers, has horrible support, and is overpriced. For me at least it's really because of the bad support. If I had to use their products but patches were easy to get at no additional cost I'd survive. I switched to Linux as my primary OS more than a decade ago after Microsoft gave me the run around for replacing a damaged disk my new copy of Windows had in the box. They sent me to the vendor and the vendor sent me to Microsoft. Back and forth over and over - oh, and Microsoft's support line charged by the minute. Over the years I've found lots of other reasons to dislike Microsoft but that was the straw that broke the camels back in my case.
When Apple and Google start acting like that then maybe I'll hate them too.
Who was trying for the moral higher ground? The point was that very few people feel a need to help someone that has more than them. If you want to ask for help then don't advertise that you have it better than most of the people that you're asking for help. It's just not an intelligent way to go about the process.
It's like asking for handouts at the soup kitchen while decked out in a lot of expensive jewelry.
At least I wouldn't advertise that I was upper middle class. That makes it really hard to get much sympathy from those of us that were born to just plain poor parents and had to drag our asses up to middle class with nobody to help us. If you're only a few thousand short then I agree with the poster - get a job. Leave the scholarship money for people that need it to go to ANY college.
Not that it helps you but I think the government should foot the bill for all education needed to prepare people for today's workforce. An adequate workforce and intelligent voters is why we pay for public education. Times have changed and at least a bachelors degree is required to meet those requirements today so the public school system should change to cover that. Maybe not to send everyone to MIT but I think guaranteeing the chance to get a college education is a good idea. I'd go so far as to offer higher degrees, at the governments cost, to people going into medicine, teaching, science, and engineering as I think those fields are most useful to our society.
Sure that's the real problem but what can we do about it besides find tech fixes? I work 40+ hours a week, school + homework is another 40 hours a week, and I have a wife and family to spend time with. There just aren't enough hours in the day to squeeze everything in. Even with only sleeping three hours a night it's hard to fit it all in. Luckily I've hardly slept for the past 15 years (I'm 30 now) so it's not that rough on me. For people that need more sleep it must be really hard.
:)
I don't fall asleep at work, school, or in the car but if I try to watch tv with my family I tend to fall asleep a lot. Not sure how much of that is because of lack of sleep and how much is because of the quality of television programming.
I use nano. Nobody likes me.
Your iPhone is more pimp than my computer of not to many years ago was. Sure for small devices small code matters a bit more than for full PCs but it doesn't matter near as much as it used to.
It's better for the movie companies to have Bluray cracked anyway. I am a huge movie person but I mostly had stopped buying DVDs while I waited for Bluray to get cracked. I wasn't buying any movies until it was cracked because I want to be able to make backups and shift the movies to my computer hdd for playback. Now I can move forward and buy Bluray movies.
I'm sure I'm not the only one that doesn't want to be told what they can do with the media they buy.
For that matter, what about people like m that leave bots running to collect useful information? Some of them even download files as they go so I could very well have illegal content on my system somewhere and have no idea it's there. It's all to easy to follow hyperlinks without meaning to and even to download content without knowing what it is. Even if you deleted it as soon as you saw what it was they could claim you'd downloaded and viewed it.
That's part of the reason I'm considering putting my Internet search and indexing projects into a virtual machine that uses an encrypted hdd and memory. There is to much risk that simply trying to find better methods to search the Internet could get horrible charges brought against us coders.
Until the program uses up all your memory and then drags your entire computer into lag hell. FF3 is an improvement over FF2 in this. Overall FF3 is having a lot less of a negative impact. The single biggest problem I have with web browsing isn't the browser though - it's Flash. Flash, and a few other plugin's, leak tons of memory and hog CPU resources when not even doing anything. This is really bad in Linux.
Other than the Flash issue FF2 and FF3 are both way faster, and less intensive, than IE7 and heck they can even properly render a page.
Nobody should run anti-virus software. It doesn't really work most of the time, it fscks up your computer, and the real problem could be solved just by some user education and smart computing behavior. Servers that handle file transfers are the ones that should do virus scanning. A trusted source for getting files should be trustworthy in every regard - good security, virus scanning, etc.
Battle Bots is awesome but I agree. It'd be much more impressive if they forced the bots to fend for themselves.
I always wanted to see a show that combined Battle Bots and Junkyard Wars too. You have one day and one garbage dump to put together the coolest bot you can and then have them tear each other apart. Otherwise it can become to much a competition of who can spend the most money.
I'm surprised the military doesn't sponsor these kinds of shows. It can only lead to more interest and more experience in building mechanized combat bots.
So long as nothing gets deleted it doesn't really matter if moderators are stupid. I'd suggest making it so users can choose to ignore given moderators if they want to.
I'd also suggest a tree of authority for moderators so that all moderations get passed up the line to someone to approve or disapprove. Amy is master moderator for the whole of Wikipedia. Bob is master moderator for Programming. Cindy is master moderator for Java. Debie, Ellen, and Frank are normal moderators that make decisions on some changes to some Java articles. Cindy can't actually make any moderations herself but she can pass or veto the mods made by Debie, Ellen, and Frank. Bob can do the same for what Cindy passes through. Amy can do the same for what Bob passes through. The idea is to screen out bad mods. In most cases master mods would just rubber stamp what gets passed to them but they would have the chance not to. Something similar as to how the Linux kernel is developed. Obviously mods and master mods that passed stuff up that got vetoed a lot might be subject to removal.
I might even go so far as to offer different trees of authority that could be chosen by the user so that if they don't like the paid moderators they could choose an alternate. Maybe alternate paid mods or even community volunteers. For instance, right-wing Christians might choose an authority that was in line with their morals so that the encyclopedia's default view would be inline with what they want to teach their children.
You'd moderator specific changes. Not a very hard thing to do with a text document. Just highlight the diff'd data for specific updates so that it could be moderated. Obviously you'd need some sort of moderation view but that'd be no big deal. It'd be similar to an edit view as opposed to a normal view.
The real discussion would come from how you'd show an edited chunk that was an edit of one you didn't want to see by someone you did want to see. I'd suggest having the latest edit be the one that counts in that case.
Hdd space is cheap so the only problem with allowing anything and everything is in making it easy to sort. Making a Slashdot-like rating system would help quite a bit. Users could then mod stuff up and down and flag certain types of content. Users with high karma would get an auto flag to the top.
On top of that I'd add paid moderators and experts to enter content and double check that no users cheat the karma/mod system into letting them inappropriately get material miscategorized or misrated.
Nothing has to be deleted. Just make it easy for users to sort through. If someone wants to see every stupid thing anyone has put in then let them. If someone wants to see only expert content then let them. Isn't that the whole point of allowing every user to customize their own experience? Just make the default something reasonable such as all expert content and all content of a reasonably high karma/mod value.
A loan can be difficult to get especially if you're trying a business that isn't just a copy of an already established business. Investors have the negative impact of wanting a large chunk of your business which can be daunting. Either way, if the business doesn't work out you can be left in a worse place than when you started.
I think our society, overall, no longer takes enough risks. Risk is what enables us to leap forward.