You buy a toaster, it toasts. If it doesn't work, you throw it away and get a new one. You buy a TV, maybe it works maybe it stops working, maybe lightning strikes it, but if you push the channel button and it doesn't work, you get it fixed or replace it. Dishwasher stops working, you call someone and have it fixed.
Computer... I can't just click something I want to click, I have to unpack it and set it to be executable. I have to think? I don't want to think, I just want Farmville to work. If I can't match these 3 jewels together, someone is going to have to fix this for me what's this box? OK. OK, goddammit just go away! You're blocking my jewels! Fucking, OK, okay? O MUTHER FUCKING KAY, I get it. UNUUNUNNNGNGNGHGHGHGNFNG!
Customer calls tech support.
Tech: What were you doing when this happened? Customer: I don't know, I was playing my game and some strange things just started happening. Tech: Such as? Customer: I was trying to play a game and these boxes came up that had nothing to do with the game. It was broken. Tech: You broke it by installing a virus, that's what you did when you clicked OK. Customer: You don't know anything about computers. Were you even listening? It was doing stupid shit BEFORE I CLICKED OK! Tech: No, those windows were trying to alert you to a security problem Customer: Why would there be a security problem if it wasn't already broken dipshit? Tech: That was Windows, asking if you wanted to allow something Customer: I wanted to allow it to play MY FUCKING GAME that it wouldn't let me play. Tech: You installed a virus. Customer: I'm going to bash you head in with a box of Cheerios. Customer's mom: So what was all that about? Customer: That guy was pretending to be a computer nerd so he could ask me out or something, and he had herpes or something, I don't know. He didn't know anything about computers and wasn't listening to me and didn't believe me. Customer's mom: Hello, Police? I'd like to report a crime...
I can only assume you are making a reference to the NSA warrantless wiretapping which was thrown out because the plaintiffs did not have standing. Why? Because they were not singled out for government abuse - the government abused everyone, not those particular people, and therefore those particular people had no right to sue.
So not just a lawyer, a federal judge thought the same thing.
Late on Thursday, Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that because the internet traffic of millions of Americans had been caught up in the dragnet, the harm alleged in the complaint was not specific to the plaintiffs, so the case should not proceed.
You clearly have no sense of self-preservation. That being a critical trait to the survival of the species, I've made an appointment for your at your local Species Betterment clinic, who will gladly assist you in doing what is right for mankind. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, and have a nice day.
I believe they already know the problem and don't want to release information that would help certify a class action suit. I have read reputable reporting that they fixed this in later cars but did not think it was bad enough to recall earlier ones.
In other words, it would help everyone except Toyota, which is why they are playing games.
Right now, there are lots of people who blame driver error, and the recalls that have been detailed are physical rearrangement of the brake, floor mat, or other parts in that area. All of this could be a distraction from faulty code. I have read of an update which gives brake priority over anything else, but drivers report that doesn't fix the problem.
Ultimately, what I conclude is that Toyota has a general idea of where the fault is, and is selling a product known to have potential safety risks, but is making fixes without knowing if that is the true root cause. If that comes out, Toyota will probably be forced to halt sales until they can fully document and prove the cause is known and the issue has been fixed for good.
In other words, if someone else solves the problem, Toyota USA is going to take a huge hit. So you release the parts you're sure don't reveal anything until the NHTSA orders all doata be handed over.
There are reasons why you might want to do that, usually it's high-performance drivers. Is your mother on the NASCAR or demolition derby circuit?
If not then the usual explanation is that it's best to learn in an automatic using one foot, so that if you ever have to drive a manual you're used to switching and dedicate your other foot to the clutch. Your mother, having driven for a number of years the way she does, is probably better off not changing because it's all automatic, and re-learning tasks like that can cause lock-up in an unexpected situation when your brain decides which path to choose. If you look at recent research on the "choke" phenomenon, usually in sports, the explanation is that you practice something a million times and it's just natural, muscle memory. When your free throw determines whether your team loses or goes into overtime, you think about it consciously, overriding the smoothness of muscle memory. You probably don't want your mom to choke.
The only reason it would be unsafe is if she were driving an unpatched Toyota, where the brake is not set as the override, and the computer can choose to honor the accelerator instead of the brake if they are both pressed, and if she ever presses both at the same time. It's your mom, so have her drive you somewhere and watch her feet.
To support you - there was a grounding of airplanes a while back when I was about to travel for business. Some of us had flights on the type of plane which was grounded, so I was following this quite closely. I jokingly sent a link to my brother, asking him if these were the planes he was making oil pumps for, expecting him to interpret it as "your little brother is blaming you for airplane accidents, ha ha you litle snot."
His reply was, paraphrased, actually yes. We keep getting failure reports, but when the company returns the part to us we can't make it fail unless we operate it out of spec. Customer said the oil pump has to operate in this temperature and pressure range, and all of the other details. When we look at other parts in the same plane they look like they are operating above temperature spec, leading us to think you're operating our pumps outside of the spec. Raise the temperature and it fails in exactly the way you describe. Customer of course says no, the temperature is controlled and doesn't exceed the spec, your part is faulty.
Not sure of the resolution, but it was several months of back and forth, and either there isn't a temperature sensor there or the customer wouldn't release that data or something.
Justifying something based on its performance on outlier conditions has never been a good idea. The number of accidents where the tail falls off is probably greater than the number of accidents where the tail falls off and the software would be able to compensate.
Maybe having the "oh shit" button turn this on would be a good idea, but I think if you look at the number of crashes and their causes, you'd want to build redundancy in the rudder or strengthen the tail.
"NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Toyota has known about brake problems in its popular Prius cars for some time, going so far as to fix it in new production vehicles, but has kept Prius drivers in the dark about the problem until the Japanese government called for an investigation." http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/04/autos/prius_timeline/index.htm
Your opinion of its likelihood is not relevant. Not only is it likely, evidence points to it being true. You are being disingenuous by phrasing it "no economic gains to be had by killing your customers." A product has a flaw, people die, that happens sometimes. If you issue a recall, you draw attention to the problem and cost yourself money in lost sales, repair costs, and possible lawsuits. "Killing your customers" is a bit different from "hoping that driver error is the official cause, not faulty cars," and you deciding to phrase it that way is an appeal to emotion, not a logical argument.
You can say we're just arguing semantics, but you're going to have to back up your unlikely opinion with links to convince me.
You are far too kind and considerate of an internet poster to be a real person, and while your normal strategy is to communicate in succinct and straight-to-the-point posts with high information density, you exceeded your average words-per-post count by a large margin by using an uncharacteristically redundantly styled example to help a fellow netizen who is also a likely, as you have observed, jester.
You sir, have earned a laurel, and hearty handshake. I dub thee *sir* Beardo the Bearded, and bequeath to you the additional title "Soupcatcher of the Highest Order".
Sincerely, Jose Von Guantanimous-Knightsock III (you may refer to me as [b4dc0d3r], or 1268512 for short).
I worked at Target, and spent some time being the label printer/sticker-onner guy. Even at slightly-above-minimum-wage it would have been a giant cost savings if we only used it for 2 months out of the year - November and December. Automatic pricing updates are one thing, but removing those stickers is a pain, and the cost of putting the sticker under the wrong product results in lost profit (see footnote). Getting the correct prices updated quickly and especially accurately throughout an entire store where daily sales are around $100k (Christmas sales, not all year long) - that would pay for itself right there.
I believe that is sufficient evidence that the cost/benefit analysis favors these things, with customer resistance being ignored. The shoes department at Kohl's already use these, have used it for at least 5 years in my area, I believe.
In addition to that, my point about altering prices stands. You're not gouging twenty cents on a gallon of milk - you're gouging on thousands of gallons of milk. It is the ultimate cost maximization tool. Uncle Bub's corner grocery isn't going to do this stuff - think Wal-Mart instead. The sheer volume of customers makes a single-penny adjustment to a single product for 1 day across all their stores a very lucrative proposition.
Knowing this, I'll fight back by keeping my UPC database synchronized and carrying around a barcode-reading camera-equipped cell phone to tell me what the prices have been on products, alerting me when this is in use so I can skip buying.
Footnote: Not theoretical lost profits like "lost sales due to piracy" lost. Customer sees the receipt or register show a price that didn't match the label, you hold up the line for a price check, some people in a hurry may drop their purchase altogether, you lose the difference between the marked and actual price. And the worst part is when a savvy customer knows the usual price and sees it marked lower, and buys more than they otherwise would have because a physical price tag gives them the right to claim false advertising or bait-and-switch pricing. I've been a backup cashier at the same Target, and as little as I got called to go run a register I saw this happen all the time. I was authorized to take the customer's word for small differences. I talked K-Mart into giving me a $35 item for $25 based on poorly labeled goods, that's a significant discount not including the manager's time.
So yeah, just get a part time job in a high-volume grocery or big box store and it will be pretty obvious very soon.
My gf knows a lot about astrology, and believes it has an influences on your personality. A good recommendation engine could use this information along with everything else. Your birth year is significant, but it doesn't run 1 Jan to 25 Dec. I'm not sure if this is based on the Chinese calendar or if that's a separate data point... but in order to identify your sign and year, you need to know the exact date.
I don't lend astrology much credence, but if you're going to tell me it doesn't work I'd like some repeatable science on it, or at least download the dataset yourself and see if any patterns emerge before just saying it doesn't work. I haven't tried it myself, because I don't think I know enough about astrology to correlate significant data points. Of course, people lie about their birth date (I do, and at least one other in this thread does) so you're analyzing self-reported birth dates, not actual ones, making science cry.
First you recognize a problem exists, then someone finds a clever solution. I'm also pretty sure that the person who will solve this problem is not reading comments in a slashdot discussion about it.
We had virus signtures, but that didn't work so some clever person invented heuristics. That did a decent job for a while, then someone came up with behavior-based detection.
I'm fairly certain that a good whitelist solution will be invented soon. I'm just as sure that it will allow users to override the system so they can save their shopping lists, excel docments, music, torrent downloads, and malicious software to any folder and run it.
What would happen if everyone on the planet updated to the latest version of their web browser overnight? Nothing, that's what, because people will still download icon collections and animated cursors (or both in "themes") and file.mp3.exe with a Media Player icon, and ParisHilton.jpg.exe with an Image Viewer icon.
A perfect solution will be invented, and users will bypass it. A coworker's husband reports having to constantly clean her computer because she keeps clicking on internet games. She's not an idiot, but she won't stop because the games are fun.
The only way for the security industry to win is to kill all of the humans except those responsible for killing the humans (and those responsible for building defenses against the humans that would rather not have their day interrupted). Did we learn anything from I, Robot? From 2001: A Space Odyssey? A perfect technological solution requires either the elimination of humans or intentional imperfection of the solution.
Google can't realistically "win" in this situation. Your post suggests that Google keep doing what it's doing. Chinese law is not a public opinion poll, and as you mention that will result in someone going to jail. You don't break national laws and hope it works out for the best!
The intellectual and philosophical movement will either happen or not happen at this point, and doesn't depend on whether Google puts up a fight. That cat's out of the bag, and most of the people likely to revolt are already aware of what's happening. I'm suggesting the opposite - if Google caves and leaves or censors results, the people will have much more incentive to revolt. If Google fights, the people have less incentive to be involved personally, because Google (and any employees which pass near or it China) is taking the attack for them.
The obvious course is for Google to put up a banner that says "Search results have been filtered on request of the Chinese Government", if the law allows. Assuming that's not allowed, then Google must follow whatever the law says, and let the people decide for themselves what to do next. Leave or censor, doesn't matter. The government will probably claim that they didn't request filtering, and there was never any argument, and a good number of people sadly will believe that.
Are you saying you can't implement key pair encryption over this for some reason? Send scrambled data and it won't matter who's listening. By the time they decrypt it, your business plan has already publically failed and the intel they gathered is too old to be useful. As long as your vendor has a rigorous implementation of course, which is always a consideration.
The Mr. Wizard's World episode where they connected I think a record player's needle to a flashlight, and directed it at the portion of a home movie projector that reads the audio track and played the record back was pretty cool. That was probably in the earlier range between 1983 and 1990.
It did occur to me to rush home and duplicate this, but I was already home, and I was also maybe 10 years old, so nothing much came of it. Seems we keep rediscovering the same old thing, but being able to stand on others' shoulders makes it progressively easier to see practical application each time. So three cheers for limited patent lifetimes.
"boom boom boom" is the sync header, that's how you know in what order to reassemble the data stream. Maybe now you realize why the "lyrics" don't make any sense. You are conditioned to take your network packets in any order, but still cling to the quaint notion of ordered audio streaming. Fascinating.
From a retailer's point of view, the object is not a cost-basis rationalization. More likely, this introduces the opportunity to introduce demand-based pricing, in other words more opportunities to update pricing.
Prices can be lowered on rainy days when sales are slower, enticing people to buy things because they are cheaper. Except for weather-related supplies, those automatically increase when the humidistat registers 80% humidity outside.
You can regulate the post-holiday sales signs and keep marked items clearly marked, while optimizing profit by lowering prices when sales fall. No need to red-sticker things with 50%, 75%, 80%, 90% off stickers and finally throw it away because it's covered in sticky.
When the weather man predicts snow and everyone runs out for milk, bread, and toilet paper, the registers can alert the manager of a spike in sales, and decide whether to announce low prices or price gouge.
It's a whole new world of free-market capitalism. Add on some random microphones and voice recognition, coupled with gmail-style keyword based advertising, and you can raise prices on things people mention from their shopping list - until they say "costs to much" or "too high" then it drops back to regular price.
That's the problem with people like you - always applying things to "now" instead of thinking about new ways to gouge your fellow humans for fun and profit.
It's true. Java is a language and a platform,.NET is a platform. In a lot of ways,.NET took the idea of Java and addressed some complaints, resulting in a better Java. No citation there, that's just opinion I see from time to time.
Java has an awful lot of segmentation due to all of the 3rd party stuff that was later integrated into Java, so multiple ways to do the same thing..NET has a huge library and multiple ways to do the same thing, but it's all in the library - nothing external. So if you see some.NET code, you can bring it in (usually regardless of the language) and use it. Java has things like NetBeans running atop Swing - and NetBeans is both a platform and an IDE for other languages. Basically it was pieced together over 15 years, and it shows.
The biggest black eye in the face of Java is all of the complaints about performance. It's not inherently slow, but the underlying runtime allowed developers to do things like repeated string concatenation instead of using string builder, making the app way more sluggish than it needed to be. You can be an idiot in.NET, but they made things more efficient from the start, just as Java has improved performance. You can still be an idiot in Java, but it's harder now.
XNA is intended to be a gaming platform, whereas Java was intended to be general-purpose. I believe that makes Kooty-Sentinel (1291050) at least partly correct. XNA is one of those add-ons like NetBeans, so arguing about.NET vs. Java is kinda retarded.
There are Java-based gaming frameworks - many, in fact. so if you want to have a flame war, it should be XNA against [jMonkeyEngine | Jogre | Lightweight Java Game Library ], I'm sure there are others as well.
If you attempted to do any part of what this guy does every day, you'd be in prison probably indefinitely, and he gets a paycheck. Is that a double standard?
You would be accused of different infractions because you are not an employee in charge of maintaining that data. Simply trying to log in would be attempted hacking or unauthorized access, where this guy probably logged in every day as part of his job.
You weren't cleared for access and given permission and credentials to access the information. This guy's job was updating the database. I'm guessing he used a front-end to do his work, not direct back-end access, and that may be the source of the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
You buy a toaster, it toasts. If it doesn't work, you throw it away and get a new one. You buy a TV, maybe it works maybe it stops working, maybe lightning strikes it, but if you push the channel button and it doesn't work, you get it fixed or replace it. Dishwasher stops working, you call someone and have it fixed.
Computer... I can't just click something I want to click, I have to unpack it and set it to be executable. I have to think? I don't want to think, I just want Farmville to work. If I can't match these 3 jewels together, someone is going to have to fix this for me what's this box? OK. OK, goddammit just go away! You're blocking my jewels! Fucking, OK, okay? O MUTHER FUCKING KAY, I get it. UNUUNUNNNGNGNGHGHGHGNFNG!
Customer calls tech support.
Tech: What were you doing when this happened?
Customer: I don't know, I was playing my game and some strange things just started happening.
Tech: Such as?
Customer: I was trying to play a game and these boxes came up that had nothing to do with the game. It was broken.
Tech: You broke it by installing a virus, that's what you did when you clicked OK.
Customer: You don't know anything about computers. Were you even listening? It was doing stupid shit BEFORE I CLICKED OK!
Tech: No, those windows were trying to alert you to a security problem
Customer: Why would there be a security problem if it wasn't already broken dipshit?
Tech: That was Windows, asking if you wanted to allow something
Customer: I wanted to allow it to play MY FUCKING GAME that it wouldn't let me play.
Tech: You installed a virus.
Customer: I'm going to bash you head in with a box of Cheerios.
Customer's mom: So what was all that about?
Customer: That guy was pretending to be a computer nerd so he could ask me out or something, and he had herpes or something, I don't know. He didn't know anything about computers and wasn't listening to me and didn't believe me.
Customer's mom: Hello, Police? I'd like to report a crime...
I can only assume you are making a reference to the NSA warrantless wiretapping which was thrown out because the plaintiffs did not have standing. Why? Because they were not singled out for government abuse - the government abused everyone, not those particular people, and therefore those particular people had no right to sue.
So not just a lawyer, a federal judge thought the same thing.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/22/nsa_dismissal/
There are FIVE words!
This one's better, but it has a bit of swearing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in6RZzdGki8
Yo momma so fat everyone accepts it as common knowledge and thus has no need to draw attention to it, so they make fun of you instead.
You clearly have no sense of self-preservation. That being a critical trait to the survival of the species, I've made an appointment for your at your local Species Betterment clinic, who will gladly assist you in doing what is right for mankind. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, and have a nice day.
I believe they already know the problem and don't want to release information that would help certify a class action suit. I have read reputable reporting that they fixed this in later cars but did not think it was bad enough to recall earlier ones.
In other words, it would help everyone except Toyota, which is why they are playing games.
Right now, there are lots of people who blame driver error, and the recalls that have been detailed are physical rearrangement of the brake, floor mat, or other parts in that area. All of this could be a distraction from faulty code. I have read of an update which gives brake priority over anything else, but drivers report that doesn't fix the problem.
Ultimately, what I conclude is that Toyota has a general idea of where the fault is, and is selling a product known to have potential safety risks, but is making fixes without knowing if that is the true root cause. If that comes out, Toyota will probably be forced to halt sales until they can fully document and prove the cause is known and the issue has been fixed for good.
In other words, if someone else solves the problem, Toyota USA is going to take a huge hit. So you release the parts you're sure don't reveal anything until the NHTSA orders all doata be handed over.
There are reasons why you might want to do that, usually it's high-performance drivers. Is your mother on the NASCAR or demolition derby circuit?
If not then the usual explanation is that it's best to learn in an automatic using one foot, so that if you ever have to drive a manual you're used to switching and dedicate your other foot to the clutch. Your mother, having driven for a number of years the way she does, is probably better off not changing because it's all automatic, and re-learning tasks like that can cause lock-up in an unexpected situation when your brain decides which path to choose. If you look at recent research on the "choke" phenomenon, usually in sports, the explanation is that you practice something a million times and it's just natural, muscle memory. When your free throw determines whether your team loses or goes into overtime, you think about it consciously, overriding the smoothness of muscle memory. You probably don't want your mom to choke.
The only reason it would be unsafe is if she were driving an unpatched Toyota, where the brake is not set as the override, and the computer can choose to honor the accelerator instead of the brake if they are both pressed, and if she ever presses both at the same time. It's your mom, so have her drive you somewhere and watch her feet.
To support you - there was a grounding of airplanes a while back when I was about to travel for business. Some of us had flights on the type of plane which was grounded, so I was following this quite closely. I jokingly sent a link to my brother, asking him if these were the planes he was making oil pumps for, expecting him to interpret it as "your little brother is blaming you for airplane accidents, ha ha you litle snot."
His reply was, paraphrased, actually yes. We keep getting failure reports, but when the company returns the part to us we can't make it fail unless we operate it out of spec. Customer said the oil pump has to operate in this temperature and pressure range, and all of the other details. When we look at other parts in the same plane they look like they are operating above temperature spec, leading us to think you're operating our pumps outside of the spec. Raise the temperature and it fails in exactly the way you describe. Customer of course says no, the temperature is controlled and doesn't exceed the spec, your part is faulty.
Not sure of the resolution, but it was several months of back and forth, and either there isn't a temperature sensor there or the customer wouldn't release that data or something.
Justifying something based on its performance on outlier conditions has never been a good idea. The number of accidents where the tail falls off is probably greater than the number of accidents where the tail falls off and the software would be able to compensate.
Maybe having the "oh shit" button turn this on would be a good idea, but I think if you look at the number of crashes and their causes, you'd want to build redundancy in the rudder or strengthen the tail.
Your opinion of its likelihood is not relevant. Not only is it likely, evidence points to it being true. You are being disingenuous by phrasing it "no economic gains to be had by killing your customers." A product has a flaw, people die, that happens sometimes. If you issue a recall, you draw attention to the problem and cost yourself money in lost sales, repair costs, and possible lawsuits. "Killing your customers" is a bit different from "hoping that driver error is the official cause, not faulty cars," and you deciding to phrase it that way is an appeal to emotion, not a logical argument.
You can say we're just arguing semantics, but you're going to have to back up your unlikely opinion with links to convince me.
[Beardo],
You are far too kind and considerate of an internet poster to be a real person, and while your normal strategy is to communicate in succinct and straight-to-the-point posts with high information density, you exceeded your average words-per-post count by a large margin by using an uncharacteristically redundantly styled example to help a fellow netizen who is also a likely, as you have observed, jester.
You sir, have earned a laurel, and hearty handshake. I dub thee *sir* Beardo the Bearded, and bequeath to you the additional title "Soupcatcher of the Highest Order".
Sincerely,
Jose Von Guantanimous-Knightsock III (you may refer to me as [b4dc0d3r], or 1268512 for short).
Yes.
You read this post in the thread? And read this link from that post?
This one? http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1579924&cid=31451930
I worked at Target, and spent some time being the label printer/sticker-onner guy. Even at slightly-above-minimum-wage it would have been a giant cost savings if we only used it for 2 months out of the year - November and December. Automatic pricing updates are one thing, but removing those stickers is a pain, and the cost of putting the sticker under the wrong product results in lost profit (see footnote). Getting the correct prices updated quickly and especially accurately throughout an entire store where daily sales are around $100k (Christmas sales, not all year long) - that would pay for itself right there.
I believe that is sufficient evidence that the cost/benefit analysis favors these things, with customer resistance being ignored. The shoes department at Kohl's already use these, have used it for at least 5 years in my area, I believe.
In addition to that, my point about altering prices stands. You're not gouging twenty cents on a gallon of milk - you're gouging on thousands of gallons of milk. It is the ultimate cost maximization tool. Uncle Bub's corner grocery isn't going to do this stuff - think Wal-Mart instead. The sheer volume of customers makes a single-penny adjustment to a single product for 1 day across all their stores a very lucrative proposition.
Knowing this, I'll fight back by keeping my UPC database synchronized and carrying around a barcode-reading camera-equipped cell phone to tell me what the prices have been on products, alerting me when this is in use so I can skip buying.
Footnote: Not theoretical lost profits like "lost sales due to piracy" lost. Customer sees the receipt or register show a price that didn't match the label, you hold up the line for a price check, some people in a hurry may drop their purchase altogether, you lose the difference between the marked and actual price. And the worst part is when a savvy customer knows the usual price and sees it marked lower, and buys more than they otherwise would have because a physical price tag gives them the right to claim false advertising or bait-and-switch pricing. I've been a backup cashier at the same Target, and as little as I got called to go run a register I saw this happen all the time. I was authorized to take the customer's word for small differences. I talked K-Mart into giving me a $35 item for $25 based on poorly labeled goods, that's a significant discount not including the manager's time.
So yeah, just get a part time job in a high-volume grocery or big box store and it will be pretty obvious very soon.
My gf knows a lot about astrology, and believes it has an influences on your personality. A good recommendation engine could use this information along with everything else. Your birth year is significant, but it doesn't run 1 Jan to 25 Dec. I'm not sure if this is based on the Chinese calendar or if that's a separate data point... but in order to identify your sign and year, you need to know the exact date.
I don't lend astrology much credence, but if you're going to tell me it doesn't work I'd like some repeatable science on it, or at least download the dataset yourself and see if any patterns emerge before just saying it doesn't work. I haven't tried it myself, because I don't think I know enough about astrology to correlate significant data points. Of course, people lie about their birth date (I do, and at least one other in this thread does) so you're analyzing self-reported birth dates, not actual ones, making science cry.
First you recognize a problem exists, then someone finds a clever solution. I'm also pretty sure that the person who will solve this problem is not reading comments in a slashdot discussion about it.
We had virus signtures, but that didn't work so some clever person invented heuristics. That did a decent job for a while, then someone came up with behavior-based detection.
I'm fairly certain that a good whitelist solution will be invented soon. I'm just as sure that it will allow users to override the system so they can save their shopping lists, excel docments, music, torrent downloads, and malicious software to any folder and run it.
What would happen if everyone on the planet updated to the latest version of their web browser overnight? Nothing, that's what, because people will still download icon collections and animated cursors (or both in "themes") and file.mp3.exe with a Media Player icon, and ParisHilton.jpg.exe with an Image Viewer icon.
A perfect solution will be invented, and users will bypass it. A coworker's husband reports having to constantly clean her computer because she keeps clicking on internet games. She's not an idiot, but she won't stop because the games are fun.
The only way for the security industry to win is to kill all of the humans except those responsible for killing the humans (and those responsible for building defenses against the humans that would rather not have their day interrupted). Did we learn anything from I, Robot? From 2001: A Space Odyssey? A perfect technological solution requires either the elimination of humans or intentional imperfection of the solution.
Google can't realistically "win" in this situation. Your post suggests that Google keep doing what it's doing. Chinese law is not a public opinion poll, and as you mention that will result in someone going to jail. You don't break national laws and hope it works out for the best!
The intellectual and philosophical movement will either happen or not happen at this point, and doesn't depend on whether Google puts up a fight. That cat's out of the bag, and most of the people likely to revolt are already aware of what's happening. I'm suggesting the opposite - if Google caves and leaves or censors results, the people will have much more incentive to revolt. If Google fights, the people have less incentive to be involved personally, because Google (and any employees which pass near or it China) is taking the attack for them.
The obvious course is for Google to put up a banner that says "Search results have been filtered on request of the Chinese Government", if the law allows. Assuming that's not allowed, then Google must follow whatever the law says, and let the people decide for themselves what to do next. Leave or censor, doesn't matter. The government will probably claim that they didn't request filtering, and there was never any argument, and a good number of people sadly will believe that.
Are you saying you can't implement key pair encryption over this for some reason? Send scrambled data and it won't matter who's listening. By the time they decrypt it, your business plan has already publically failed and the intel they gathered is too old to be useful. As long as your vendor has a rigorous implementation of course, which is always a consideration.
The Mr. Wizard's World episode where they connected I think a record player's needle to a flashlight, and directed it at the portion of a home movie projector that reads the audio track and played the record back was pretty cool. That was probably in the earlier range between 1983 and 1990.
It did occur to me to rush home and duplicate this, but I was already home, and I was also maybe 10 years old, so nothing much came of it. Seems we keep rediscovering the same old thing, but being able to stand on others' shoulders makes it progressively easier to see practical application each time. So three cheers for limited patent lifetimes.
You misunderstand. Your site has to be in a straight line.
That way the receptionist in the front can get her e-mail. And no prairie-dogging, every time that happens our uptime drops like an Alaskan winter.
"boom boom boom" is the sync header, that's how you know in what order to reassemble the data stream. Maybe now you realize why the "lyrics" don't make any sense. You are conditioned to take your network packets in any order, but still cling to the quaint notion of ordered audio streaming. Fascinating.
From a retailer's point of view, the object is not a cost-basis rationalization. More likely, this introduces the opportunity to introduce demand-based pricing, in other words more opportunities to update pricing.
Prices can be lowered on rainy days when sales are slower, enticing people to buy things because they are cheaper. Except for weather-related supplies, those automatically increase when the humidistat registers 80% humidity outside.
You can regulate the post-holiday sales signs and keep marked items clearly marked, while optimizing profit by lowering prices when sales fall. No need to red-sticker things with 50%, 75%, 80%, 90% off stickers and finally throw it away because it's covered in sticky.
When the weather man predicts snow and everyone runs out for milk, bread, and toilet paper, the registers can alert the manager of a spike in sales, and decide whether to announce low prices or price gouge.
It's a whole new world of free-market capitalism. Add on some random microphones and voice recognition, coupled with gmail-style keyword based advertising, and you can raise prices on things people mention from their shopping list - until they say "costs to much" or "too high" then it drops back to regular price.
That's the problem with people like you - always applying things to "now" instead of thinking about new ways to gouge your fellow humans for fun and profit.
How do the IT guys there pronounce the braces? Ours have trouble, so if you have tips or some exercises I'd love to pass it on.
Hmm, didn't the U.S. throw off the yoke of British government to make something better? Oops...
It's true. Java is a language and a platform, .NET is a platform. In a lot of ways, .NET took the idea of Java and addressed some complaints, resulting in a better Java. No citation there, that's just opinion I see from time to time.
Java has an awful lot of segmentation due to all of the 3rd party stuff that was later integrated into Java, so multiple ways to do the same thing. .NET has a huge library and multiple ways to do the same thing, but it's all in the library - nothing external. So if you see some .NET code, you can bring it in (usually regardless of the language) and use it. Java has things like NetBeans running atop Swing - and NetBeans is both a platform and an IDE for other languages. Basically it was pieced together over 15 years, and it shows.
The biggest black eye in the face of Java is all of the complaints about performance. It's not inherently slow, but the underlying runtime allowed developers to do things like repeated string concatenation instead of using string builder, making the app way more sluggish than it needed to be. You can be an idiot in .NET, but they made things more efficient from the start, just as Java has improved performance. You can still be an idiot in Java, but it's harder now.
XNA is intended to be a gaming platform, whereas Java was intended to be general-purpose. I believe that makes Kooty-Sentinel (1291050) at least partly correct. XNA is one of those add-ons like NetBeans, so arguing about .NET vs. Java is kinda retarded.
There are Java-based gaming frameworks - many, in fact. so if you want to have a flame war, it should be XNA against [jMonkeyEngine | Jogre | Lightweight Java Game Library ], I'm sure there are others as well.
Did I mention Java is heavily segmented?
If you attempted to do any part of what this guy does every day, you'd be in prison probably indefinitely, and he gets a paycheck. Is that a double standard?
You would be accused of different infractions because you are not an employee in charge of maintaining that data. Simply trying to log in would be attempted hacking or unauthorized access, where this guy probably logged in every day as part of his job.
You weren't cleared for access and given permission and credentials to access the information. This guy's job was updating the database. I'm guessing he used a front-end to do his work, not direct back-end access, and that may be the source of the problem.