Here in the UK there is a fascinating point of law - religions only get tax-exempt status if they are monotheistic. Richard Dawkins has a big thing about trying to persuade a Hindu temple to go to court for charity status, since they are legally a polytheistic, and thus heathen, religion, but actually all the gods are avatars of the one God, or something. Anyway, profit should be taxed, whether you dance around chicken innards or sell chocolate.
Whoever heard of a religion that didn't make money?
Those that feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, provide shelter for the homeless (cf. Matt. 25:35) and that sell their posessions to give to the poor (cf. Luke 18:22). They tend to be the ones you've not heard of unless you're in their neighbourhood and in need.
Dude, seriously? You think I should ring up the IRS and tell them that I don't need to pay tax because I help out at the local homeless shelter? If someone works out a way of profiting from Matthew 25:35 or Luke 18:22, then it should be taxed. You don't appear to have read any of the posts above your own - no one is saying that churches should be taxed period, they're saying that any profits a church makes should be taxed.
I personally wouldn't demonize TPB. While this kind of sharing isn't the nicest thing, if the companies who are being effected had been decent about their cost structure people wouldn't have resorted to this in the first place.
To be honest, I'm starting to see the whole argument about filesharing redundant. If the cost structure was fairer I would most certainly spend more money on it. However, if I walked into a shop and bought everything I had downloaded over the last year, say, we end up with this:
~1 000 albums, at £15 each = £15 000 (assuming cheap albums balance out rare items - I know for a fact the market value of some of my Nina Simone stuff would be in the hundreds of pounds, but I'm choosing to assume that they are outliers and can be ignored)
~250 films, at £10 each = £2 500
~50 full seasons of TV shows, at £20 each = £1 000
TV shows as and when they come out in their country of origin = a little over £1 000
~30 games, at £35 each = £1 050
Adding up to a grand total of £19 550 ($32 851.38). So assuming I didn't have to pay rent or bills, buy food, or have any way of watching this stuff / listening to this music / playing these games, I'd still need a significantly increased household income. And I haven't really listened to / watched / played loads of that stuff, I just like being able to think "I want to watch x genre" and having it there, and when someone comes round and I discover they've never seen WarGames, come on, I need to be able to show them...
The point being, I spend most of my disposable income on media of various sorts, but that doesn't mean I can afford everything I want - and if I can have it, why not? No one would be getting my money if I didn't 'steal' it, so the only person losing out would be me. The whole argument has been rendered redundant in my case by me not having a huge pile of cash to hand over in the first place. The RIAA/MPAA/whoever can take me to court for however many millions of dollars if they want - they'll get a lower percentage of my income awarded to them than I hand over voluntarily.
tl;dr: my girlfriend gets annoyed at how much I spend on media, when I should pay bills, and I still pirate more than 95% of the stuff I own. Meh.
I find it funny that people assume that they are going to get full peek bandwidth at all, let alone 24/7. ISPs obviously can't provide full bandwidth 100% of the time so they have to throttle the power users. The Internet couldn't handle such traffic let alone most switches and routers
Actually, I get exactly the bandwidth I pay for - just as often I get too much as too little. My broadband provider - BeUnlimited, in the UK - actually seems to try to give customers the speed that they were sold the connection at. Not only that, but I get that speed at my house, not at an exchange two miles away. Of course, Be is at the expensive end of competitive pricing, but I'm willing to pay extra for good service and a lack of lies.
If just feels to me like people are complaining about the quality of their $.99 cheeseburgers. They want real beef, but they won't pay for it.
Really? It sounds to me like people are complaining because they only have one restaurant in town, by civil statute, and that restaurant advertises its cheeseburgers as top quality, good value, 100% beef, when actually they aren't beef and are more expensive than pretty much anywhere else in the world, bar places that need satellite links.
Not happy with the options with your local ISPs? Start your own!
Okay, I'll tell you what - you provide the startup capital and I'll do all the work, and we'll split the profits seventy-thirty to you. Now all I need is for you to give me a few hundred million so I can set up my ISP, rather than leasing line space under painfully restrictive and purpose-defeating conditions, and within a couple of years we'll both be tremendously rich!
I'm running Debian Sid and I've had fewer problems than are listed in the article.
Really? Because I'm running Ubuntu 9.10, and I have had no problems whatsoever. It took less time than on Windows to get streaming DivX working, flash works full screen without caning my GPU or processor, most of my settings were imported quite happily from Jaunty and XP, and the thing I spent the most time on (two hours or so) was setting up Compiz to be just the way I like it, and that's just because it takes me one and three quarters of an hour to make my mind up. My HDDs mounted fine, my graphics look great, wireless works a treat, no sound issues - massive improvement there - and all is good on my laptop.
People with problems complain, because they can't do whatever it was that they wanted to do that the problem stopped them doing. People without problems just get on with what they're doing, rather than spending their time on forums looking for ways of saying "This distro's great!"
Seriously, I've just skimmed down the page trying to find examples of people saying their Karmic upgrade sucked, and there aren't many. However, there are a hell of a lot of people saying it was fine. I'd like to add that the only problem I had was that it took about fifteen minutes from booting the computer with the disk in to being a usable system, because I was at my parents' house and they have a crappy internet connection. Seriously, this is the kind of place people bitch when stuff doesn't work and big it up when it does, and very few people here have been critical of the install that they did.
If you walk into a store and you found a $1000 suit, and you can't afford it, you can't just take it and say they are over pricing it, this doesn't make sense especially if accross the street you can find the thrift store that has a reasonable suit for free!
How about if I want a really nice suit, and everywhere I look there are adverts saying "This is the best suit in the world!", so I go to a Licensed Suit Distribution Centre to get my lovely $1000 suit. I put it on, and, y'know, it fits pretty well. I walk around a bit, and start noticing an annoying chafing thing happening. Irritated by the chafing, I take off the suit and decide to wash it, since it smells of city stink. I take my nice suit to the dry-cleaner, who says "Sorry, you can't wash this suit." Hmm. So I go back to the Distributor and ask how I'm supposed to wash the suit.
"Sorry sir, these suits are unwashable. You'll notice that it says so right here on page 38 of the 465-page document we assumed you agreed to, due to you buying the product - after all, you wouldn't buy a product if you didn't agree with the terms of purchase, therefore you agreed to the terms of purchase, because you bought the product. If you want a clean suit, you'll have to buy another one. However, we do offer a rather fine GenuineAdvantageSuitDisposalService(TM)!"
Sometimes I cannot figure [Microsoft] out. I actually think that the Office 2007 interface, now that I've forced myself to use it every once in awhile (I'm teaching a class that is helped by knowing how to do things in it so I can explain), I think that, had I never used the product before, I'd take to it very quickly... OpenOffice, even though I don't like it, is easy to use.
And this is why they have to change everything. If people who grow up on Windows try to change to a different OS, it should be as hard as possible and look as different as possible. This is how you exploit a monopoly position. MS know that their biggest threat is free software that's easier to use and more stable, so they leave bugs in their OS to make third-party solutions less stable and constantly change the interface of their software just to be counter intuitive, until people learn that way, in which case what we use now becomes counter intuitive.
Honestly, it's rigodamndiculous how difficult it is to find, download, and install software on Linux. At least compared to the Windows/Mac platform... 2 freakin hours to install some software on CentOS? Tracking down weird shit in the configure logs to figure out what the hell is going on. 30 minutes on Google to figure out it is a problem with the libxml2 linking. Another hour to fix the damn thing. That's not going to pass the Granny Test.
I agree wholeheartedly! I mean, I use RandomTechieLinuxDistro, and for some reason using a distro set up to be technical is a technical experience! The gall! OK, so on Ubuntu I would click on add/remove programs and have several thousand programs right there. So what? Grannies obviously usually compile their own kernels and just boot into a shell. Why would they ever use the most popular Linux distro out there, just because it takes way less time to install than XP or OSX, can be tested from a live disk, is free, and is laughably easy to use?
Sorry, I still don't get it.
They've been building OSS4 for years, it seems a good tool for the job, and yet it cannot be included in the kernel or distributed by various distros ? If they add trouble understanding GPL 5 years ago, ok, but isn't there any communication between 4front and the rest of the community on the subject.
Weird.
Kind of like if you went to synagogue regularly, became part of the local Jewish community, and then went in one day wearing a Swastika armband and started screaming about how you'd sue them for slander if they kept insisting that the holocaust happened./Godwin
OK, so maybe not exactly the same, but they were a part of a community that places a high value on ideas like openness and trust, and then they pissed all over that. Now no one wants anything to do with them because it's simply not worth getting sued over it, especially when users can just install it themselves if they care so much. I know I couldn't afford a lawsuit with these folks.
Currently PulseAudio is one of the range of audio solutions on Linux that is a bag of crap. I use Linux myself, and very rarely run into problems, but when I do the solution is usually to turn off PulseAudio. Essentially it suffers from the old Linux problem of doing lots of cool stuff very well, but doing the very basic stuff (like taking some input and transferring it to some speakers) quite badly.
I genuinely feel that audio is what is really holding back Linux on the desktop, because there is not one stable API but several unstable ones. Of course, audio is a bloody hard thing to get right, and not something most developers are going to spend a lot of time on, but it's important dagnabbit!
Or the company simply was watching everything he was doing online and keylogged him or logged his internet traffic and thus never needed access to his private inbox.
I'm pretty sure most people would call a Man-In-The-Middle attack 'hacking' or 'cracking', depending on pedanticism*.
Not sure how [il]legal THAT would be, though the computer is a company resource and presumably the employee's contract would inform him of the monitoring being done while he is using his computer there.
Yes, there is a good chance that this guy's contract had some disclaimer about company property being monitored - maybe moral, maybe not, but you'd have to be pretty dumb to use a work computer, at work, to conspire against the company you work for, justified or not.
*Yes, that is how it should be written, look it up.
OK, so it isn't, but I will have gotten some grammar Nazi's heart racing just there!
This brings up an interesting idea - if South Korean Dangerface were to ring South Korean AdamInParadise and we were to play hangman, and the word I chose was 'fucktards', would we get our phones taken away?
From the Oxford Dictionary of Psychology, the premier psychological dictionary of Britain:
sociopathyn. Another name for antisocial personality disorder. sociopathn. A person with sociopathy.
And here's the definiton of antisocial personality disorder:
antisocial personality disordern. A personality disorder characterized by a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, beginning in childhood or early adolescence and continuing into adulthood, with such signs and symptoms as failure to conform to social norms, manifested by repeated unlawful behaviour; deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying or swindling [confidence trickery] for pleasure or personal gain; impulsivity or failure to plan ahead; irritability and aggressiveness involving frequent assaults or fights; reckless disregard for the safety of self or others; consistent irresponsibilty involving failure to hold down jobs or to honour financial obligations; and lack of remorse for the mistreatment of others, as indicated by indifference or rationalization.
Please note that not all of these indicators need necessarily be present for a diagnosis of sociopathy, but my apologies, I don't have a copy of the DSMIV with me right now. In any case, jandersen is talking out of his arse, and has apparently made up a definition of sociopathy by watching some TV shows.
... but that is only a layman's opinion.
Yes, jandersen, it is a layman's opinion. Perhaps you have heard the saying "'tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt"?
I would not lend Michael Bay $1 to make a movie, let alone give him $20M
Really? I would, for the same reason the film industry is booming - a two- to three-year turnaround and you triple your money, plus masses of royalties for as long as people want to watch massive blockbusters.
... geek has always had its positive sides... fanboy has never been positive in any way
What is positive about being developmentally retarded and biting the heads of chickens in order to amuse paying onlookers, exactly? You know, since that's the original meaning of the word geek. And fanboy is not a direct synonym of fanatic, no matter how much you want it to be - it is sometimes used that way, but really just means 'a male fan, who is at the rather extreme end of fan'.
So, what you're actually saying is that most people on the net will only be able to watch these videos if they install something they have been told isn't safe?
The problem is obviously not a technical one - I would assume the only people who use IE on this site are forced to by a workplace where they don't have admin permissions - but a simple statement that things generally take a very long time to succeed if they have to fight against the looming behemoth that is Microsoft.
I still have a copy of Burn After Reading that was a little over 700MB and 720p, with good quality sound and no artifacts that I noticed. Maybe it'd need to be a gig and a half to be perfect quality, but I couldn't tell the difference between it and Blu-Ray on a 24" monitor. So being very harsh indeed with the upscaling, maybe 4 to 5 gigs for full 1080? The only problem is finding that rare uploader who cares enough or uses a professional level edit suite.
Office still boots twice as fast as OpenOffice on a typical computer... in practice, it doesn't seem to be hurting them anyway.
I have to disagree - OpenOffice on my Linux partition boots faster than Office on my Windows partition on the same computer. The problem is when MS gimp Windows to hell - they know the workarounds, so Office runs OK. OpenOffice just have to use trial and error and a whole lot of guesswork to rid themselves of bugs that only exist to give MS an advantage. I completely understand that the average Joe Sixpack doesn't care, but that's why MS is still managing to sell gimped OSs.
I assume it works the same way in Canada as it does here in the UK. I know a few civil servants (as in, employees of government) who work directly with Members of Parliament, and whenever an MP has to do a press conference or similar they put together a brief. This brief could be long and detailed, but is more than likely to be a few pages of bullet points, pretty graphs, and very, very simple information.
The reason for this is that MPs have very little actual power and very little use for actual knowledge. In a buzzword sense, they are the blue sky thinkers - they let off the thought grenades and let other people tidy up the mind juice. Knowing stuff is for the people who actually write the laws - you don't seriously think an actual legislator sits down and writes several thousand pages of law, consults with experts in case law and senior judges, runs focus groups on what to call the sections of laws, etc.?
Newsflash: politicians are good at politics, and spending a life becoming one of the best in the country at something (in this case politics) leaves little time for learning stuff and keeping up to date with it, especially when you don't know what you're going to be in charge of until you're in charge of it.
In summary, this guy is a moron, and Western political systems are set up to put the wrong people in charge.
The population of London is expected to drop below 50% English by 2012.
From what I can see from a quick wiki of the last census, more than two thirds of the population of London is British born, and quite a few of the foreigners are from British families that emigrated and then moved back.
Would you want to let that happen with your own capital?
Assuming your premise is right, yes, I would let that happen to both the city I live in and the capital of my country. But these tests have nothing to do with 'Britishness' - they are about genetics and poorly-formed pseudo-scientific analysis. If you want to define Britishness go ahead and give it a try, but we're less ethnically pure than pretty much anyone, so that's a no go.
For example, I'm British, and there is no one that would contest that (well, very few). However, my ethnic heritage back to my grandparents is one quarter white British, one quarter white German, and one half European Jew. Additionally, I can parle un petit peu Francais, sprechen Deutsch, and make stabs in the dark in Spanish and Italian. My area is fairly white, for London, but the main types of takeaway / restaurant nearby are focused on Chinese, Thai, Indian, and American cuisine. This is not a country where ideas of purity work well.
If everyone would just follow the goddamned standards then we wouldn't have to worry about this shit. Yes I'm blaming all parties involved here, they are all either directly responsible, or too complacent.
So, you're blaming the standards-compliant browser devs for, presumably, being too complacent? I suppose they could use their 1337 haxxorzing skillz and IEs innate insecurities to install Firefox, Opera, Chrome et al on everyone's PCs, and then uninstall IE, but I think not doing so is maybe not just complacency?
And what you say is not a huge bag of fail why, exactly? He just said that having stores makes perfect sense, since they make money for the parent company and nudge the consumer in the right direction, plus maybe make life easier on the developer. All he was saying was that he wouldn't trade that OMG one click!!eleven! for a device that won't let him install what he wants from it; there isn't a dichotomy between an app store and a user's ability to install stuff on their phones.
As far as the customers are concerned, the iTunes App Store is a smashing success.
As far as customers are concerned Vista was better because it was shinier. Customers are marketing's job - down here's for people who want stuff to work.
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Here in the UK there is a fascinating point of law - religions only get tax-exempt status if they are monotheistic. Richard Dawkins has a big thing about trying to persuade a Hindu temple to go to court for charity status, since they are legally a polytheistic, and thus heathen, religion, but actually all the gods are avatars of the one God, or something. Anyway, profit should be taxed, whether you dance around chicken innards or sell chocolate.
Whoever heard of a religion that didn't make money?
Those that feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, provide shelter for the homeless (cf. Matt. 25:35) and that sell their posessions to give to the poor (cf. Luke 18:22). They tend to be the ones you've not heard of unless you're in their neighbourhood and in need.
Dude, seriously? You think I should ring up the IRS and tell them that I don't need to pay tax because I help out at the local homeless shelter? If someone works out a way of profiting from Matthew 25:35 or Luke 18:22, then it should be taxed. You don't appear to have read any of the posts above your own - no one is saying that churches should be taxed period, they're saying that any profits a church makes should be taxed.
I personally wouldn't demonize TPB. While this kind of sharing isn't the nicest thing, if the companies who are being effected had been decent about their cost structure people wouldn't have resorted to this in the first place.
To be honest, I'm starting to see the whole argument about filesharing redundant. If the cost structure was fairer I would most certainly spend more money on it. However, if I walked into a shop and bought everything I had downloaded over the last year, say, we end up with this:
~1 000 albums, at £15 each = £15 000 (assuming cheap albums balance out rare items - I know for a fact the market value of some of my Nina Simone stuff would be in the hundreds of pounds, but I'm choosing to assume that they are outliers and can be ignored)
~250 films, at £10 each = £2 500
~50 full seasons of TV shows, at £20 each = £1 000
TV shows as and when they come out in their country of origin = a little over £1 000
~30 games, at £35 each = £1 050
Adding up to a grand total of £19 550 ($32 851.38). So assuming I didn't have to pay rent or bills, buy food, or have any way of watching this stuff / listening to this music / playing these games, I'd still need a significantly increased household income. And I haven't really listened to / watched / played loads of that stuff, I just like being able to think "I want to watch x genre" and having it there, and when someone comes round and I discover they've never seen WarGames, come on, I need to be able to show them...
The point being, I spend most of my disposable income on media of various sorts, but that doesn't mean I can afford everything I want - and if I can have it, why not? No one would be getting my money if I didn't 'steal' it, so the only person losing out would be me. The whole argument has been rendered redundant in my case by me not having a huge pile of cash to hand over in the first place. The RIAA/MPAA/whoever can take me to court for however many millions of dollars if they want - they'll get a lower percentage of my income awarded to them than I hand over voluntarily.
tl;dr: my girlfriend gets annoyed at how much I spend on media, when I should pay bills, and I still pirate more than 95% of the stuff I own. Meh.
I find it funny that people assume that they are going to get full peek bandwidth at all, let alone 24/7. ISPs obviously can't provide full bandwidth 100% of the time so they have to throttle the power users. The Internet couldn't handle such traffic let alone most switches and routers
Actually, I get exactly the bandwidth I pay for - just as often I get too much as too little. My broadband provider - BeUnlimited, in the UK - actually seems to try to give customers the speed that they were sold the connection at. Not only that, but I get that speed at my house, not at an exchange two miles away. Of course, Be is at the expensive end of competitive pricing, but I'm willing to pay extra for good service and a lack of lies.
If just feels to me like people are complaining about the quality of their $.99 cheeseburgers. They want real beef, but they won't pay for it.
Really? It sounds to me like people are complaining because they only have one restaurant in town, by civil statute, and that restaurant advertises its cheeseburgers as top quality, good value, 100% beef, when actually they aren't beef and are more expensive than pretty much anywhere else in the world, bar places that need satellite links.
Not happy with the options with your local ISPs? Start your own!
Okay, I'll tell you what - you provide the startup capital and I'll do all the work, and we'll split the profits seventy-thirty to you. Now all I need is for you to give me a few hundred million so I can set up my ISP, rather than leasing line space under painfully restrictive and purpose-defeating conditions, and within a couple of years we'll both be tremendously rich!
I'm running Debian Sid and I've had fewer problems than are listed in the article.
Really? Because I'm running Ubuntu 9.10, and I have had no problems whatsoever. It took less time than on Windows to get streaming DivX working, flash works full screen without caning my GPU or processor, most of my settings were imported quite happily from Jaunty and XP, and the thing I spent the most time on (two hours or so) was setting up Compiz to be just the way I like it, and that's just because it takes me one and three quarters of an hour to make my mind up. My HDDs mounted fine, my graphics look great, wireless works a treat, no sound issues - massive improvement there - and all is good on my laptop.
People with problems complain, because they can't do whatever it was that they wanted to do that the problem stopped them doing. People without problems just get on with what they're doing, rather than spending their time on forums looking for ways of saying "This distro's great!"
This.
Seriously, I've just skimmed down the page trying to find examples of people saying their Karmic upgrade sucked, and there aren't many. However, there are a hell of a lot of people saying it was fine. I'd like to add that the only problem I had was that it took about fifteen minutes from booting the computer with the disk in to being a usable system, because I was at my parents' house and they have a crappy internet connection. Seriously, this is the kind of place people bitch when stuff doesn't work and big it up when it does, and very few people here have been critical of the install that they did.
If you walk into a store and you found a $1000 suit, and you can't afford it, you can't just take it and say they are over pricing it, this doesn't make sense especially if accross the street you can find the thrift store that has a reasonable suit for free!
How about if I want a really nice suit, and everywhere I look there are adverts saying "This is the best suit in the world!", so I go to a Licensed Suit Distribution Centre to get my lovely $1000 suit. I put it on, and, y'know, it fits pretty well. I walk around a bit, and start noticing an annoying chafing thing happening. Irritated by the chafing, I take off the suit and decide to wash it, since it smells of city stink. I take my nice suit to the dry-cleaner, who says "Sorry, you can't wash this suit." Hmm. So I go back to the Distributor and ask how I'm supposed to wash the suit.
"Sorry sir, these suits are unwashable. You'll notice that it says so right here on page 38 of the 465-page document we assumed you agreed to, due to you buying the product - after all, you wouldn't buy a product if you didn't agree with the terms of purchase, therefore you agreed to the terms of purchase, because you bought the product. If you want a clean suit, you'll have to buy another one. However, we do offer a rather fine GenuineAdvantageSuitDisposalService(TM)!"
Sometimes I cannot figure [Microsoft] out. I actually think that the Office 2007 interface, now that I've forced myself to use it every once in awhile (I'm teaching a class that is helped by knowing how to do things in it so I can explain), I think that, had I never used the product before, I'd take to it very quickly ... OpenOffice, even though I don't like it, is easy to use.
And this is why they have to change everything. If people who grow up on Windows try to change to a different OS, it should be as hard as possible and look as different as possible. This is how you exploit a monopoly position. MS know that their biggest threat is free software that's easier to use and more stable, so they leave bugs in their OS to make third-party solutions less stable and constantly change the interface of their software just to be counter intuitive, until people learn that way, in which case what we use now becomes counter intuitive.
Honestly, it's rigodamndiculous how difficult it is to find, download, and install software on Linux. At least compared to the Windows/Mac platform... 2 freakin hours to install some software on CentOS? Tracking down weird shit in the configure logs to figure out what the hell is going on. 30 minutes on Google to figure out it is a problem with the libxml2 linking. Another hour to fix the damn thing. That's not going to pass the Granny Test.
I agree wholeheartedly! I mean, I use RandomTechieLinuxDistro, and for some reason using a distro set up to be technical is a technical experience! The gall! OK, so on Ubuntu I would click on add/remove programs and have several thousand programs right there. So what? Grannies obviously usually compile their own kernels and just boot into a shell. Why would they ever use the most popular Linux distro out there, just because it takes way less time to install than XP or OSX, can be tested from a live disk, is free, and is laughably easy to use?
Sorry, I still don't get it. They've been building OSS4 for years, it seems a good tool for the job, and yet it cannot be included in the kernel or distributed by various distros ? If they add trouble understanding GPL 5 years ago, ok, but isn't there any communication between 4front and the rest of the community on the subject. Weird.
Kind of like if you went to synagogue regularly, became part of the local Jewish community, and then went in one day wearing a Swastika armband and started screaming about how you'd sue them for slander if they kept insisting that the holocaust happened. /Godwin
OK, so maybe not exactly the same, but they were a part of a community that places a high value on ideas like openness and trust, and then they pissed all over that. Now no one wants anything to do with them because it's simply not worth getting sued over it, especially when users can just install it themselves if they care so much. I know I couldn't afford a lawsuit with these folks.
Currently PulseAudio is one of the range of audio solutions on Linux that is a bag of crap. I use Linux myself, and very rarely run into problems, but when I do the solution is usually to turn off PulseAudio. Essentially it suffers from the old Linux problem of doing lots of cool stuff very well, but doing the very basic stuff (like taking some input and transferring it to some speakers) quite badly.
I genuinely feel that audio is what is really holding back Linux on the desktop, because there is not one stable API but several unstable ones. Of course, audio is a bloody hard thing to get right, and not something most developers are going to spend a lot of time on, but it's important dagnabbit!
Or the company simply was watching everything he was doing online and keylogged him or logged his internet traffic and thus never needed access to his private inbox.
I'm pretty sure most people would call a Man-In-The-Middle attack 'hacking' or 'cracking', depending on pedanticism*.
Not sure how [il]legal THAT would be, though the computer is a company resource and presumably the employee's contract would inform him of the monitoring being done while he is using his computer there.
Yes, there is a good chance that this guy's contract had some disclaimer about company property being monitored - maybe moral, maybe not, but you'd have to be pretty dumb to use a work computer, at work, to conspire against the company you work for, justified or not.
*Yes, that is how it should be written, look it up.
OK, so it isn't, but I will have gotten some grammar Nazi's heart racing just there!
This brings up an interesting idea - if South Korean Dangerface were to ring South Korean AdamInParadise and we were to play hangman, and the word I chose was 'fucktards', would we get our phones taken away?
From the Oxford Dictionary of Psychology, the premier psychological dictionary of Britain:
sociopathy n. Another name for antisocial personality disorder. sociopath n. A person with sociopathy.
And here's the definiton of antisocial personality disorder:
antisocial personality disorder n. A personality disorder characterized by a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others, beginning in childhood or early adolescence and continuing into adulthood, with such signs and symptoms as failure to conform to social norms, manifested by repeated unlawful behaviour; deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying or swindling [confidence trickery] for pleasure or personal gain; impulsivity or failure to plan ahead; irritability and aggressiveness involving frequent assaults or fights; reckless disregard for the safety of self or others; consistent irresponsibilty involving failure to hold down jobs or to honour financial obligations; and lack of remorse for the mistreatment of others, as indicated by indifference or rationalization.
Please note that not all of these indicators need necessarily be present for a diagnosis of sociopathy, but my apologies, I don't have a copy of the DSMIV with me right now. In any case, jandersen is talking out of his arse, and has apparently made up a definition of sociopathy by watching some TV shows.
... but that is only a layman's opinion.
Yes, jandersen, it is a layman's opinion. Perhaps you have heard the saying "'tis better to be silent and be thought a fool, than to speak and remove all doubt"?
I would not lend Michael Bay $1 to make a movie, let alone give him $20M
Really? I would, for the same reason the film industry is booming - a two- to three-year turnaround and you triple your money, plus masses of royalties for as long as people want to watch massive blockbusters.
... geek has always had its positive sides ... fanboy has never been positive in any way
What is positive about being developmentally retarded and biting the heads of chickens in order to amuse paying onlookers, exactly? You know, since that's the original meaning of the word geek. And fanboy is not a direct synonym of fanatic, no matter how much you want it to be - it is sometimes used that way, but really just means 'a male fan, who is at the rather extreme end of fan'.
And a major gripe in the European psyche is that we keep invading them and they never let us win!
That's just bad form, old chap, bad form.
So, what you're actually saying is that most people on the net will only be able to watch these videos if they install something they have been told isn't safe?
The problem is obviously not a technical one - I would assume the only people who use IE on this site are forced to by a workplace where they don't have admin permissions - but a simple statement that things generally take a very long time to succeed if they have to fight against the looming behemoth that is Microsoft.
I still have a copy of Burn After Reading that was a little over 700MB and 720p, with good quality sound and no artifacts that I noticed. Maybe it'd need to be a gig and a half to be perfect quality, but I couldn't tell the difference between it and Blu-Ray on a 24" monitor. So being very harsh indeed with the upscaling, maybe 4 to 5 gigs for full 1080? The only problem is finding that rare uploader who cares enough or uses a professional level edit suite.
Office still boots twice as fast as OpenOffice on a typical computer ... in practice, it doesn't seem to be hurting them anyway.
I have to disagree - OpenOffice on my Linux partition boots faster than Office on my Windows partition on the same computer. The problem is when MS gimp Windows to hell - they know the workarounds, so Office runs OK. OpenOffice just have to use trial and error and a whole lot of guesswork to rid themselves of bugs that only exist to give MS an advantage. I completely understand that the average Joe Sixpack doesn't care, but that's why MS is still managing to sell gimped OSs.
I assume it works the same way in Canada as it does here in the UK. I know a few civil servants (as in, employees of government) who work directly with Members of Parliament, and whenever an MP has to do a press conference or similar they put together a brief. This brief could be long and detailed, but is more than likely to be a few pages of bullet points, pretty graphs, and very, very simple information.
The reason for this is that MPs have very little actual power and very little use for actual knowledge. In a buzzword sense, they are the blue sky thinkers - they let off the thought grenades and let other people tidy up the mind juice. Knowing stuff is for the people who actually write the laws - you don't seriously think an actual legislator sits down and writes several thousand pages of law, consults with experts in case law and senior judges, runs focus groups on what to call the sections of laws, etc.?
Newsflash: politicians are good at politics, and spending a life becoming one of the best in the country at something (in this case politics) leaves little time for learning stuff and keeping up to date with it, especially when you don't know what you're going to be in charge of until you're in charge of it.
In summary, this guy is a moron, and Western political systems are set up to put the wrong people in charge.
The population of London is expected to drop below 50% English by 2012.
From what I can see from a quick wiki of the last census, more than two thirds of the population of London is British born, and quite a few of the foreigners are from British families that emigrated and then moved back.
Would you want to let that happen with your own capital?
Assuming your premise is right, yes, I would let that happen to both the city I live in and the capital of my country. But these tests have nothing to do with 'Britishness' - they are about genetics and poorly-formed pseudo-scientific analysis. If you want to define Britishness go ahead and give it a try, but we're less ethnically pure than pretty much anyone, so that's a no go.
For example, I'm British, and there is no one that would contest that (well, very few). However, my ethnic heritage back to my grandparents is one quarter white British, one quarter white German, and one half European Jew. Additionally, I can parle un petit peu Francais, sprechen Deutsch, and make stabs in the dark in Spanish and Italian. My area is fairly white, for London, but the main types of takeaway / restaurant nearby are focused on Chinese, Thai, Indian, and American cuisine. This is not a country where ideas of purity work well.
If everyone would just follow the goddamned standards then we wouldn't have to worry about this shit. Yes I'm blaming all parties involved here, they are all either directly responsible, or too complacent.
So, you're blaming the standards-compliant browser devs for, presumably, being too complacent? I suppose they could use their 1337 haxxorzing skillz and IEs innate insecurities to install Firefox, Opera, Chrome et al on everyone's PCs, and then uninstall IE, but I think not doing so is maybe not just complacency?
And what you say is not a huge bag of fail why, exactly? He just said that having stores makes perfect sense, since they make money for the parent company and nudge the consumer in the right direction, plus maybe make life easier on the developer. All he was saying was that he wouldn't trade that OMG one click!!eleven! for a device that won't let him install what he wants from it; there isn't a dichotomy between an app store and a user's ability to install stuff on their phones.
As far as the customers are concerned, the iTunes App Store is a smashing success.
As far as customers are concerned Vista was better because it was shinier. Customers are marketing's job - down here's for people who want stuff to work.