Call me juvenile. If you accidentally kill a bunch of my relatives, I'm pissed, but I can be reasoned with. Intentionally kill ONE of my relatives, and you will never reason with me.
We all die, yes. But, being murdered isn't preordained.
"I've not seen a lot of high-quality PC games given away"
You could at least define "high quality". If you mean high FPS, lots of bling, lots of gore, and flashing lights - yeah, you're probably right. Linux doesn't have a lot of high quality games. To me, nethack is pretty high quality.
I might agree with you that we shouldn't have gone to war with Afghanistan. Instead, we could have just launched a punitive campaign. Go in, wreck the government, chase down Al Queda and Taliban officials, destroy their opium fields, maybe destroy some infrastructure, then LEAVE. The whole idea behind a punitive campaign is to PUNISH the people and/or the government that insulted us. There's no need to have a long, protracted occupation. Just go in, get the job done, congratulate each other, pass out a few medals, and go home.
Sorry, but I put absolutely NO FAITH in tobacco related death numbers. Especially not when I listen to radio blurbs from Louisiana that claim x thousand people die annually due to second hand smoke. The "researchers" for tobacco related deaths blow more smoke up our asses than smokers ever blow into the atmosphere. Nothing is done in moderation in America, and the crusade against tobacco is typical of Americans. Turn up the hype, make up some numbers, scare the children, and never forget to use the line, "But think of the children!"
Automobiles do in fact kill tens of thousands of people, annually. That is an indisputable fact.
"the people at the top are cowards regardless of politics "
Spot on. Almost everyone old enough to have in interest in Slashdot should remember the hysteria in Washington after 9/11. Invade Afghanistan (which I agreed with) invade Iraq (did not agree with) Kill Osama, he's mailing us anthrax, pass the Patriotic Gestapo Bill quickly - etc ad nauseum. Mass frigging hysteria. "If you're not with us, you're against us." In effect, telling the whole world to choose sides, because we're headed for Armageddon. (Or, Ragnarock, depending on your choice of scenarios.)
"So now it's impossible to advertise without tracking?"
Exactly. Just put the ads up, and I'll ignore them like I do anyways. Adblock Plus kills most of them, the few I see are meaningless clutter that is easy to ignore.
"(fricking/. time limit! I can perfectly write a meaningful response in 5 seconds.)"
Try typing with your toes.;^) If you get to speedy with your toes, well, you can try hunt and peck with your pecker! THAT would slow you down!
CCleaner behaves badly? I beg to differ. CCleaner cleans trash. It ASKS you if you want to clean trash, then it TELLS you about the trash it finds, then ASKS again if you want to delete the trash.
Those who are to stupid to follow directions and/or to examine the results before taking out the trash deserve what they get.
As for those flash game files - big deal if all of them are deleted. The wife plays online flash games. Her files have been deleted by one or another privacy software. She logs back in to the site, and all her "important" saved stuff is loaded back onto her computer. Geez - that's a real burden isnt' it?
After the first time, she learned how to delete those super cookies without deleting the files she wanted saved.
Terrible learning curve, that. It took her all of 30 seconds of cussing and bitching, plus another 90 seconds of reading, and then ten more seconds to change the settings.
Meanwhile, Better Privacy routinely deletes all the asshattery of flash cookies that she didn't specifically authorize on her machine, and everyone is happy. Except the asshats, of course.
As for the lawsuit - yes, Super Cookies are a hack, and should be subject to hacking laws that are meant to protect the average user. Burn Quantcast for developing and using it, and burn everyone who has bought the damned thing. I don't care WHAT business you are in - you have no right to track people unless they specifically opt-in to a tracking program, with full knowledge and understanding of what they are doing.
I hear the runaround thing. I was looking at one of those federal grant sites some time ago. Had to pay $1 or so to get access to some stuff, so I paid. I THOUGHT that I had read everything, I paid the small fee, downloaded some documents, read them decided the place wasn't what I was looking for. The following month, I had a charge of about $40 on my card.
The credit card company refused to halt the transaction! Utter asswipes! They claim to be concerned with security, but when a customer calls in to say, "I'm being ripped off!", they do nothing.
I got better response from the scammers when I called them. One call was all it took for them to agree NOT to charge me any more.
My thoughts exactly. Up until the cop identified himself, the cyclist would have been entirely justified in shooting him down like a dog. Plain clothes, unmarked car, he pulls up beside me, and cuts me off? I wouldn't have sat there long enough for him to get out of his car, so I would never have learned that he was a cop.
I think you might have missed something there. Or, at least missed it's significance.
"unconfirmed legal"
What does that mean, exactly? If I have money in my wallet, and a cop asks to see it, do I have to verify in some manner that it was "legally earned"? The cop documents it as "unconfirmed legal tender"?? I mean, WTF???
Torrents are either legal or they are illegal. Creating a new category "unconfirmed legal" assumes the need for some official to confirm that the torrent is legal, or it will fall into the illegal category. No official confirmation means you're a CRIMINAL for downloading and/or uploading it.
The thought police must be summoned to examine each and every torrent!
"so you might be stuck with ONLY unauthorized apps,"
You say that like it's a bad thing.
There are so many disgruntled 3rd-party Apple developers, they are likely to stampede to those alternative app stores. "Screw you, Apple, I don't NEED your restrictive app store anymore!"
Or not. We'll have to wait and see what does happen.
The Obama administration is onboard the ACTA train. I don't think the administration had anything to do with this DMCA business. It runs contrary to ACTA, IMHO.
You're asking a bit to much with that. When I buy an automobile, I can change out the computer chip to make it high performance, or to make it more fuel efficient, or in some cases, to do both at the same time.
I can change the exhaust, and put headers on it.
I can change the wheels and tires.
I can do all kinds of crazy shit with a car, if I want to. Change the heads, change the cam, bore and stroke the thing, you name it.
But, I have no right to expect Chevy, Ford, or any other auto vendor to warrant that the car will run well with my changes.
Uhhhh - if that is true, then why was Lt. Calley convicted of wrongdoing at My Lai? And, even My Lai was tame and pussified compared to what a "ruthless" army would do.
Part of the problem here is, you really don't understand the term "ruthless". The commander doesn't count ANY cost, on his road to victory. The troops are encouraged to kill, mutilate, torture, steal, and even rape. Ruthless means no mercy. None. Not even for the children.
Even General Sherman wasn't ruthless when he gutted Georgia. He left behind a little food for the civilians. His "scorched earth policy" was tempered for the sake of the women and children. Perhaps you should look again at some of the historical sieges and campaigns. Real ruthlessness might have been found in the US Army during the Indian wars. We did indeed commit some serious atrocities in those years.
Define "great numbers". Then, back the numbers up. I get kind of tired of this line of propaganda. Show me pictures, and RELIABLE statistics. No, vague claims of tens of thousand of dead reiterated by some tribal who likely can't count to 100 don't count. I know that some activist groups will accept such vague accounts, I won't.
The US doesn't define it's missions properly, if you ask me. Afghanistan should have never become a full fledged war. A punitive expedition, designed to break the government that thumbed it's nose at us would have been more fitting. Spend 3 to 6 months in country, destroying the army, and hunting for the Taliban, then depart. Punishment, plain and simple. All of our soldiers come home, and it's over. It's idiotic to go into a country, blow things up for a few years, expect the natives to love us, then start rebuilding things in our image. Idiocy combined with arrogance.
"Our weaponry and style of war is far more ruthless today "
Bullshit. Every combat action is subject to public scrutiny, and the commanders have to answer to a Congress that watches the news, right along with reading full reports from the front line.
We do not wage a "ruthless" war. We haven't done so since about 1950. We fight "humane" wars. We bend over backwards to avoid inflicting civilian casualties and civilian damage. We have very strict rules of engagement. If you think our troops are "ruthless", you have no concept of what ruthless really is.
A ruthless military would identify a village from which some combatants came, surround that village, destroy all the structures with air strikes and artillery, then they would roll through it with armor, and follow up with infantry. A sign would be erected, "This village destroyed as penalty for supplying 10 soldiers to fight against America." And, the bodies would be left lying in the road when everyone left. That is ruthlessness.
Uhhhh - no system is infallible. Sonar is remarkable. On sonar that would be around 40 years old today, one could actually listen to fish doing fishy things, miles away. You could hear a man sneeze underwater, again, miles away. Even the most stealthy of submarines make noise as it passes through the water - mostly from the propellor of course, but the steam plant makes noise, and the crew makes noise. Machinery inside the sub makes noise. You can hear all of it, if you have very good ears, proper training, and good equipment. A good sonar tech can hear a scuba diver long before the diver gets close enough to plant a limpet mine. But, NONE of it is infallible.
You can potentially take a noisy 1800's steam ship out to run a blockade, and succeed. Because nothing works like it's supposed to all the time.
If you think that S. Korean or any other sonar arrays are impenetrable, you have almost no understanding of sonar, or people, or of complex systems in general. NOTHING WORKS CORRECTLY ALL THE TIME! Repeat that a few thousand times - then go out and preach it to the people around you who fail to understand it.
Alright. Don't laugh at me. Really, don't laugh. I had assumed the "thinking position" on the Great White Porcelain Throne when the name came to me. Evergreen. A quick google gives me several hits for pentium replacements. I don't see my excact chip among the results - I replaced a plain old Pentium (before we had names like P1 and P2, etc) with one of these Evergreen chips. Articles I'm reading seem to suggest that they are powered by Pentium, they are just repackaged, and fitted to cards or whatever to fit your machine.
The specific chip that I bought all those years ago looked very similar to the Pentium that I replaced, it had a silver sticker with a green logo on it, and the numbering on the chip itself was unlike the markings on a genuine Pentium. Of course, it had to fit into the same ZIF socket, so it coudln't look VERY different from the original Pentium.
As I recall, the Pentium was clocked at 100 mhz, the fastest replacement was 133 mhz, but the Evergreen offered 166 mhz. But, that is ancient memory - I may have those speeds mixed up with later chips.
I actually read that entire PDF. The reasoning is so convoluted, I fear my brain has twisted around itself. How do I unread it?
Really - having read it, all I got from it was that the claimant failed to prove damages. Well - that, and the fact that downloading and using a hacked software doesn't make me liable for bypassing DMCA. The second part is the only part that really matters to most slashdotters. But, the first point seems at least as important. If the claimant cannot reasonably demonstrate real damages, then he should be entitled to NOTHING!!
Slashdot Mirror
Whoosh.
GP was referencing an XKCD page, involving a few cheap hardware tools, as opposed to expensive "brute force" password cracking.
Call me juvenile. If you accidentally kill a bunch of my relatives, I'm pissed, but I can be reasoned with. Intentionally kill ONE of my relatives, and you will never reason with me.
We all die, yes. But, being murdered isn't preordained.
I'm trying to figure out what the heck you're talking about. Strained graphene is there in the title. I KNOW it has something to do with http://www.gerber.com/AllStages/Products/2nd_Foods_Meats.aspx
"I've not seen a lot of high-quality PC games given away"
You could at least define "high quality". If you mean high FPS, lots of bling, lots of gore, and flashing lights - yeah, you're probably right. Linux doesn't have a lot of high quality games. To me, nethack is pretty high quality.
IMO, ~3000 deaths is not a trivial matter.
I might agree with you that we shouldn't have gone to war with Afghanistan. Instead, we could have just launched a punitive campaign. Go in, wreck the government, chase down Al Queda and Taliban officials, destroy their opium fields, maybe destroy some infrastructure, then LEAVE. The whole idea behind a punitive campaign is to PUNISH the people and/or the government that insulted us. There's no need to have a long, protracted occupation. Just go in, get the job done, congratulate each other, pass out a few medals, and go home.
Sorry, but I put absolutely NO FAITH in tobacco related death numbers. Especially not when I listen to radio blurbs from Louisiana that claim x thousand people die annually due to second hand smoke. The "researchers" for tobacco related deaths blow more smoke up our asses than smokers ever blow into the atmosphere. Nothing is done in moderation in America, and the crusade against tobacco is typical of Americans. Turn up the hype, make up some numbers, scare the children, and never forget to use the line, "But think of the children!"
Automobiles do in fact kill tens of thousands of people, annually. That is an indisputable fact.
"the people at the top are cowards regardless of politics "
Spot on. Almost everyone old enough to have in interest in Slashdot should remember the hysteria in Washington after 9/11. Invade Afghanistan (which I agreed with) invade Iraq (did not agree with) Kill Osama, he's mailing us anthrax, pass the Patriotic Gestapo Bill quickly - etc ad nauseum. Mass frigging hysteria. "If you're not with us, you're against us." In effect, telling the whole world to choose sides, because we're headed for Armageddon. (Or, Ragnarock, depending on your choice of scenarios.)
"So now it's impossible to advertise without tracking?"
Exactly. Just put the ads up, and I'll ignore them like I do anyways. Adblock Plus kills most of them, the few I see are meaningless clutter that is easy to ignore.
"(fricking /. time limit! I can perfectly write a meaningful response in 5 seconds.)"
Try typing with your toes. ;^) If you get to speedy with your toes, well, you can try hunt and peck with your pecker! THAT would slow you down!
SuperDuperCrapCleaner has found potential malware on your computer: NTOSKRNL Delete? y/n $
CCleaner behaves badly? I beg to differ. CCleaner cleans trash. It ASKS you if you want to clean trash, then it TELLS you about the trash it finds, then ASKS again if you want to delete the trash.
Those who are to stupid to follow directions and/or to examine the results before taking out the trash deserve what they get.
As for those flash game files - big deal if all of them are deleted. The wife plays online flash games. Her files have been deleted by one or another privacy software. She logs back in to the site, and all her "important" saved stuff is loaded back onto her computer. Geez - that's a real burden isnt' it?
After the first time, she learned how to delete those super cookies without deleting the files she wanted saved.
Terrible learning curve, that. It took her all of 30 seconds of cussing and bitching, plus another 90 seconds of reading, and then ten more seconds to change the settings.
Meanwhile, Better Privacy routinely deletes all the asshattery of flash cookies that she didn't specifically authorize on her machine, and everyone is happy. Except the asshats, of course.
As for the lawsuit - yes, Super Cookies are a hack, and should be subject to hacking laws that are meant to protect the average user. Burn Quantcast for developing and using it, and burn everyone who has bought the damned thing. I don't care WHAT business you are in - you have no right to track people unless they specifically opt-in to a tracking program, with full knowledge and understanding of what they are doing.
I hear the runaround thing. I was looking at one of those federal grant sites some time ago. Had to pay $1 or so to get access to some stuff, so I paid. I THOUGHT that I had read everything, I paid the small fee, downloaded some documents, read them decided the place wasn't what I was looking for. The following month, I had a charge of about $40 on my card.
The credit card company refused to halt the transaction! Utter asswipes! They claim to be concerned with security, but when a customer calls in to say, "I'm being ripped off!", they do nothing.
I got better response from the scammers when I called them. One call was all it took for them to agree NOT to charge me any more.
Oooh - now there's a thought. Could we use cold fusion to cause global cooling?
My thoughts exactly. Up until the cop identified himself, the cyclist would have been entirely justified in shooting him down like a dog. Plain clothes, unmarked car, he pulls up beside me, and cuts me off? I wouldn't have sat there long enough for him to get out of his car, so I would never have learned that he was a cop.
I think you might have missed something there. Or, at least missed it's significance.
"unconfirmed legal"
What does that mean, exactly? If I have money in my wallet, and a cop asks to see it, do I have to verify in some manner that it was "legally earned"? The cop documents it as "unconfirmed legal tender"?? I mean, WTF???
Torrents are either legal or they are illegal. Creating a new category "unconfirmed legal" assumes the need for some official to confirm that the torrent is legal, or it will fall into the illegal category. No official confirmation means you're a CRIMINAL for downloading and/or uploading it.
The thought police must be summoned to examine each and every torrent!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjMCaw4qzjg
"so you might be stuck with ONLY unauthorized apps,"
You say that like it's a bad thing.
There are so many disgruntled 3rd-party Apple developers, they are likely to stampede to those alternative app stores. "Screw you, Apple, I don't NEED your restrictive app store anymore!"
Or not. We'll have to wait and see what does happen.
The Obama administration is onboard the ACTA train. I don't think the administration had anything to do with this DMCA business. It runs contrary to ACTA, IMHO.
You're asking a bit to much with that. When I buy an automobile, I can change out the computer chip to make it high performance, or to make it more fuel efficient, or in some cases, to do both at the same time.
I can change the exhaust, and put headers on it.
I can change the wheels and tires.
I can do all kinds of crazy shit with a car, if I want to. Change the heads, change the cam, bore and stroke the thing, you name it.
But, I have no right to expect Chevy, Ford, or any other auto vendor to warrant that the car will run well with my changes.
You should have titled your post, "Archtechs most excellent post" or something that would be memorable. Mod up, moderators!!
Uhhhh - if that is true, then why was Lt. Calley convicted of wrongdoing at My Lai? And, even My Lai was tame and pussified compared to what a "ruthless" army would do.
Part of the problem here is, you really don't understand the term "ruthless". The commander doesn't count ANY cost, on his road to victory. The troops are encouraged to kill, mutilate, torture, steal, and even rape. Ruthless means no mercy. None. Not even for the children.
Even General Sherman wasn't ruthless when he gutted Georgia. He left behind a little food for the civilians. His "scorched earth policy" was tempered for the sake of the women and children. Perhaps you should look again at some of the historical sieges and campaigns. Real ruthlessness might have been found in the US Army during the Indian wars. We did indeed commit some serious atrocities in those years.
Define "great numbers". Then, back the numbers up. I get kind of tired of this line of propaganda. Show me pictures, and RELIABLE statistics. No, vague claims of tens of thousand of dead reiterated by some tribal who likely can't count to 100 don't count. I know that some activist groups will accept such vague accounts, I won't.
The US doesn't define it's missions properly, if you ask me. Afghanistan should have never become a full fledged war. A punitive expedition, designed to break the government that thumbed it's nose at us would have been more fitting. Spend 3 to 6 months in country, destroying the army, and hunting for the Taliban, then depart. Punishment, plain and simple. All of our soldiers come home, and it's over. It's idiotic to go into a country, blow things up for a few years, expect the natives to love us, then start rebuilding things in our image. Idiocy combined with arrogance.
"Our weaponry and style of war is far more ruthless today "
Bullshit. Every combat action is subject to public scrutiny, and the commanders have to answer to a Congress that watches the news, right along with reading full reports from the front line.
We do not wage a "ruthless" war. We haven't done so since about 1950. We fight "humane" wars. We bend over backwards to avoid inflicting civilian casualties and civilian damage. We have very strict rules of engagement. If you think our troops are "ruthless", you have no concept of what ruthless really is.
A ruthless military would identify a village from which some combatants came, surround that village, destroy all the structures with air strikes and artillery, then they would roll through it with armor, and follow up with infantry. A sign would be erected, "This village destroyed as penalty for supplying 10 soldiers to fight against America." And, the bodies would be left lying in the road when everyone left. That is ruthlessness.
Uhhhh - no system is infallible. Sonar is remarkable. On sonar that would be around 40 years old today, one could actually listen to fish doing fishy things, miles away. You could hear a man sneeze underwater, again, miles away. Even the most stealthy of submarines make noise as it passes through the water - mostly from the propellor of course, but the steam plant makes noise, and the crew makes noise. Machinery inside the sub makes noise. You can hear all of it, if you have very good ears, proper training, and good equipment. A good sonar tech can hear a scuba diver long before the diver gets close enough to plant a limpet mine. But, NONE of it is infallible.
You can potentially take a noisy 1800's steam ship out to run a blockade, and succeed. Because nothing works like it's supposed to all the time.
If you think that S. Korean or any other sonar arrays are impenetrable, you have almost no understanding of sonar, or people, or of complex systems in general. NOTHING WORKS CORRECTLY ALL THE TIME! Repeat that a few thousand times - then go out and preach it to the people around you who fail to understand it.
Alright. Don't laugh at me. Really, don't laugh. I had assumed the "thinking position" on the Great White Porcelain Throne when the name came to me. Evergreen. A quick google gives me several hits for pentium replacements. I don't see my excact chip among the results - I replaced a plain old Pentium (before we had names like P1 and P2, etc) with one of these Evergreen chips. Articles I'm reading seem to suggest that they are powered by Pentium, they are just repackaged, and fitted to cards or whatever to fit your machine.
http://www.allbusiness.com/electronics/computer-equipment-computer/6909786-1.html
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-96615200.html
The specific chip that I bought all those years ago looked very similar to the Pentium that I replaced, it had a silver sticker with a green logo on it, and the numbering on the chip itself was unlike the markings on a genuine Pentium. Of course, it had to fit into the same ZIF socket, so it coudln't look VERY different from the original Pentium.
As I recall, the Pentium was clocked at 100 mhz, the fastest replacement was 133 mhz, but the Evergreen offered 166 mhz. But, that is ancient memory - I may have those speeds mixed up with later chips.
I actually read that entire PDF. The reasoning is so convoluted, I fear my brain has twisted around itself. How do I unread it?
Really - having read it, all I got from it was that the claimant failed to prove damages. Well - that, and the fact that downloading and using a hacked software doesn't make me liable for bypassing DMCA. The second part is the only part that really matters to most slashdotters. But, the first point seems at least as important. If the claimant cannot reasonably demonstrate real damages, then he should be entitled to NOTHING!!