"On slashdot, probably never. They won't stop MS bashing until both it and Bill Gates are dead. Then they'll bash whatever company took the top slot on the techie pain chain. Hey, if history had been a little different, it would have been Apple and Stevie getting the grease job..."
It's amazing how many morons are willing to defend a company that based it's growth on dishonesty. "If history had been a little different" my ass. N. Korea's Kim il Jung is despised because he's a ruthless bastard. Bill Gates is despised because he's a ruthless bastard. How could history have been a little different?
Get over yourself.
Maybe your next astroturfing job will be in a nice big football stadium somewhere, and people will actually appreciate your work.
You seem to be working from an assumption of some sort. How about we consider the taxman coming to your place of business to conduct an audit. He finds that you owe 7 million dollars in taxes, instead of the 4 million dollars that you claimed. Can you argue that the numbers aren't off by an order of magnitude? "But, sir, my numbers are only wrong by about 75%, this isn't fraud!" Or, we can work those same numbers backward - "But, sir, my numbers are only off by about 50% - of course it's not fraud!" Good luck with that, huh?
The numbers are fraudulent, plain and simple. As others have pointed out, anyone in the scientific field(s) would be laughed out of academia for submitting such flawed numbers and such flawed reasoning.
"In fact, unless they only surveyed people WITH internet access," BTW - TFA specifically says that everyone in the survey had internet access.
There is no line of work on planet earth where people are permitted to do such obviously fraudulent math. If similarly flawed mathematics were applied to a construction job by a bunch of backwoods hill billies, they would soon be out of business.
You simply cannot justify the numbers with any sort of logic. Attempting to do so is an exercise in fraud.
"stand in front of lawmakers" Figure of speech - duhh.
As you point out yourself, the size of the problem is important. The amount of money involved is more important than anything - NAFTA was passed despite what the voters wished, because there was so much money involved. After the size of payoffs, the voters perceived size of a problem are considered.
Yes, it makes a difference. When the lobbyists stand in front of lawmakers, those lawmakers want to know the real size of the problem. If the industry's lobbyists have to say, "We think we are losing almost a million pounds each and every year to piracy", lawmakers are going to be mildly concerned. However, if they lie, and claim that they are losing BILLIONS of pounds, those lawmakers realize that the tax collectors are losing a huge sum of money.
When you want action, you always exaggerate your losses and/or the governments benefit.
I think that claims in the us are 42 billion dollars lost annually. I followed THOSE studies back once, to find where the figures came from. That number is totally unsubstantiated as well, almost entirely based on guesses, estimates, and even false assumptions. One study after another cites the previous study, and almost no one knows where that 42 billion dollar figure came from, but it's impressive, so everyone continues to quote it.
1 The 7m figure had actually been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m 2 It gets worse. That 11.6% of respondents who admitted to file sharing was adjusted upwards to 16.3% "to reflect the assumption" 3 The 6.7m figure was then calculated based on the estimated number of people with internet access in the UK.
TFA is pretty clearly challenging those figures based on assumptions made, faulty estimates, and rounding up. The original "research" was clearly engineered to give a high number.
Hacked, in the context of TFA, and in the context of my post, would mean "exploited for the purpose of gaining valuable information and/or taking advantage of exploits on other computers".
I think it's fairly safe to say that any machine capable of browsing the internet can be taken advantage of, by one means or another. A ROM based machine may not be capable of hosting a trojan, virus or worm between boots - it is still a potential target for social networking, man in the middle, and other attacks. Boot up a LiveCD, browse to a Rickroll address, and tell us whether your browser can be hijacked.;^)
1. Users are mostly idiots. An educated idiot is still an idiot. 2. Despite lame excuses about "market share" that MS uses for their frequently exploited vulnerabilities, there isn't a system that CANNOT be hacked. 3. The best standards and coding practices can probably only hope to reduce exploits by about 80 to 90 percent. 4. Damn good idea. Next time you meet a marketer, shoot him. We don't need his genes in the pool.
"Thankfully, engineering was split into military and civilian engineering a loooong time ago."
You are high, right? Smoking something really strange? There is as much separation between military and civilian engineering as there is between military and civilian written languages. That is to say, there is precious little that can't be interchanged.
Trick question: In a group of people including a waitress, a secretary, a construction worker, a doctor, and a professional wrestler, who is likely to know the simplest, fastest, and easiest way to kill a human being?
You don't watch much late night television, do you? Act now, and for the special price of $19.95, not only will we send you the Palantir, but we will throw in your very own Special Agent Koworski and not one, but TWO spy decoder rings!!! Call now! That's 1-800-GUL-IBLE
Disclaimer: I've never been a "consumer", so I can't understand why people who appear to be normal accept being referred to as "consumers", or why they run out and purchase every moronic bit of shit they see in a commercial.
I don't know much about a BMW - but Harley? Please..... Overhyped outdated bullshit technology. It's a shame that all the rest of the bike manufacturers have switched over to building that stupid V-twin. I rode KZ's all through the '80's. On one bike, I rode 25,000 miles in two years, with one breakdown. The coil gave out. You're simply not going to find many Harley Davidson bikes with that kind of mileage and that kind of record.
And, like a couple other posters have pointed out: half or more of the HD bikes in this country are owned by accountants, dentists, and other professionals who use the damned things like "cafe racers". Change out of a suit, into the leather costume, ease the old hawg down close to the bar, then make a lot of noise coming into the parking lot so that everyone sees you. Wow, what a rush! Talk about macho!! After visiting two or three bars, the bike goes back into the garage, where it gets another unneeded coat of polish, just to sit until the owner feel the need to prove his manhood again.
Give me a KZ 900. It isn't very loud - well, most of the time - but that thing will carry you coast to coast comfortably and reliably. If you just HAVE to hear the thunder, crank the throttle, and listen to the sound of REAL power!
Harley? Phhht. If someone were to give me one, for free, I would just trade it in on something else. A stripped down Harley costs about twice as much as a full dressed anything else!!
Whoa, dude. GP is more on target than you seem to realize. Islamic extremists weren't tolerated very much in the Ottoman empire. They simply weren't tolerated. England was the single greatest factor in the destruction of the Ottoman. After that wonderful accomplishment, England was the single greatest force in redrawing national boundaries - INCLUDING the much fought over Israeli and Palestinian boundaries. Balfour?
No matter which side of that issue you may stand on, you could bother yourself to read a little history. Well - maybe a lot of history. The mideast situation didn't develop overnight, nor did it develop in a vacuum. And, sadly, that entire segment of history is missing from history classes in the public school system in the US.
If for no other reason, then the telcos have accepted a lot of government funding in the past which was intended to finish that "last mile". Instead of doing so, the telcos have crisscrossed each other's wires in the most lucrative market areas, oversaturating those areas, attempting to cut each other's throats.
AT&T needs to spend that 18 billion on the "last mile". That 3G network is fine and dandy, but they are neglecting to serve millions of Americans who don't have anything better than dialup.
Yeah, I have DSL now - but my sister in law just a couple miles down the highway still can't get it.
Get a clue, dude. Cheney isn't "gone". Every week he gets his goober on television, doing yet another interview, attacking the current president of the United States. When Cheney is gone, maybe we can stop badmouthing him.
"Team building exercises are a blight on co-operation."
Agreed. I always feel like the misanthrope when something like that comes along. The people I work with have never been anywhere, they've never done anything, they don't read anything (assuming they are actually literate), and they have no clue what's happening around them. But, we're all supposed to make nice and say sweet thing about each other, and be "understanding". Phhhht.
The less I know about most of them, the more I can pretend that I respect them. Management should leave well enough alone.
Not a bad idea. Not real good, but not bad. It would take some real changes in the way kids are educated. The K-12 crap needs to be half scrapped. The No Child Left Behind needs to die. Seperate education paths, starting in Kiddiegarden. You start on the fast-track to higher education, and you stay there, til you wash out. The best performers finish high school in 6, 7, or 8 years. You know the kids I'm talking about, there are millions of them. School does nothing but hold them back. Get those kids into college between ages 12 and 15, where they can find some REAL challenges. Then, you continue to challenge them.
Yes, if we took education seriously, I can see that research could be left to the universities.
This won't happen any time soon though. My youngest was denied the opportunity to take Calculus because he hadn't completed a prerequisite. The principal admits that the kid understands the concepts, but he can't take the class for lack of a prereq, which he obviously has already mastered, ON HIS OWN. We are looking at the "body count" by which schools get their revenues. A high school doesn't want to give up a student two or three years early, because they won't get PAID for that kid's presence.
Just one more indicator that our beloved capitalistic society is broken.
"There's some heavy handed "Get off my lawn"-ness going on in the article itself."
Quit yer whinin', you young punk. When we moved out of the caves, we had to WALK to the next village to get our packets!! Now get back out into the street where you belong, you're crushing my grass.
Dick Cheney? Oh - wait - we want someone smart enough to make observations and keep journals. And, there's a good chance that there is no one to torture up there.......
15 years is longer than I had stated - but I could live with it. Perhaps I hadn't made it clear that I thought copyright law is at least as perverse as patent law. I'm over 50 years old, and music older than I am is still under copyright. There is something terribly wrong with that idea. Not merely wrong - it's completely irrational! The people who wrote that music are dead and gone, for the most part. The people who performed it are dead and gone in many cases. But, some corporation "owns" the song. Absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
"On slashdot, probably never. They won't stop MS bashing until both it and Bill Gates are dead. Then they'll bash whatever company took the top slot on the techie pain chain. Hey, if history had been a little different, it would have been Apple and Stevie getting the grease job..."
It's amazing how many morons are willing to defend a company that based it's growth on dishonesty. "If history had been a little different" my ass. N. Korea's Kim il Jung is despised because he's a ruthless bastard. Bill Gates is despised because he's a ruthless bastard. How could history have been a little different?
Get over yourself.
Maybe your next astroturfing job will be in a nice big football stadium somewhere, and people will actually appreciate your work.
You seem to be working from an assumption of some sort. How about we consider the taxman coming to your place of business to conduct an audit. He finds that you owe 7 million dollars in taxes, instead of the 4 million dollars that you claimed. Can you argue that the numbers aren't off by an order of magnitude? "But, sir, my numbers are only wrong by about 75%, this isn't fraud!" Or, we can work those same numbers backward - "But, sir, my numbers are only off by about 50% - of course it's not fraud!" Good luck with that, huh?
The numbers are fraudulent, plain and simple. As others have pointed out, anyone in the scientific field(s) would be laughed out of academia for submitting such flawed numbers and such flawed reasoning.
"In fact, unless they only surveyed people WITH internet access,"
BTW - TFA specifically says that everyone in the survey had internet access.
There is no line of work on planet earth where people are permitted to do such obviously fraudulent math. If similarly flawed mathematics were applied to a construction job by a bunch of backwoods hill billies, they would soon be out of business.
You simply cannot justify the numbers with any sort of logic. Attempting to do so is an exercise in fraud.
"stand in front of lawmakers" Figure of speech - duhh.
As you point out yourself, the size of the problem is important. The amount of money involved is more important than anything - NAFTA was passed despite what the voters wished, because there was so much money involved. After the size of payoffs, the voters perceived size of a problem are considered.
Naive, huh? Right......
Yes, it makes a difference. When the lobbyists stand in front of lawmakers, those lawmakers want to know the real size of the problem. If the industry's lobbyists have to say, "We think we are losing almost a million pounds each and every year to piracy", lawmakers are going to be mildly concerned. However, if they lie, and claim that they are losing BILLIONS of pounds, those lawmakers realize that the tax collectors are losing a huge sum of money.
When you want action, you always exaggerate your losses and/or the governments benefit.
I think that claims in the us are 42 billion dollars lost annually. I followed THOSE studies back once, to find where the figures came from. That number is totally unsubstantiated as well, almost entirely based on guesses, estimates, and even false assumptions. One study after another cites the previous study, and almost no one knows where that 42 billion dollar figure came from, but it's impressive, so everyone continues to quote it.
1 The 7m figure had actually been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m
2 It gets worse. That 11.6% of respondents who admitted to file sharing was adjusted upwards to 16.3% "to reflect the assumption"
3 The 6.7m figure was then calculated based on the estimated number of people with internet access in the UK.
TFA is pretty clearly challenging those figures based on assumptions made, faulty estimates, and rounding up. The original "research" was clearly engineered to give a high number.
Is there anything else I can help you with?
The Klein attack works quite satisfactorily on a wire and bead construction.
Hacked, in the context of TFA, and in the context of my post, would mean "exploited for the purpose of gaining valuable information and/or taking advantage of exploits on other computers".
I think it's fairly safe to say that any machine capable of browsing the internet can be taken advantage of, by one means or another. A ROM based machine may not be capable of hosting a trojan, virus or worm between boots - it is still a potential target for social networking, man in the middle, and other attacks. Boot up a LiveCD, browse to a Rickroll address, and tell us whether your browser can be hijacked. ;^)
1. Users are mostly idiots. An educated idiot is still an idiot.
2. Despite lame excuses about "market share" that MS uses for their frequently exploited vulnerabilities, there isn't a system that CANNOT be hacked.
3. The best standards and coding practices can probably only hope to reduce exploits by about 80 to 90 percent.
4. Damn good idea. Next time you meet a marketer, shoot him. We don't need his genes in the pool.
Marines aren't like cops at all. A marine knows that the best defense is a good offense. Go get 'em, before they come to get you!
"Thankfully, engineering was split into military and civilian engineering a loooong time ago."
You are high, right? Smoking something really strange? There is as much separation between military and civilian engineering as there is between military and civilian written languages. That is to say, there is precious little that can't be interchanged.
Trick question: In a group of people including a waitress, a secretary, a construction worker, a doctor, and a professional wrestler, who is likely to know the simplest, fastest, and easiest way to kill a human being?
You don't watch much late night television, do you? Act now, and for the special price of $19.95, not only will we send you the Palantir, but we will throw in your very own Special Agent Koworski and not one, but TWO spy decoder rings!!! Call now! That's 1-800-GUL-IBLE
Good helpful post. I've read LOTR several times - but it's been years since the last time. I was scratching my head over Palantir.
Why buy it? I don't.
Disclaimer: I've never been a "consumer", so I can't understand why people who appear to be normal accept being referred to as "consumers", or why they run out and purchase every moronic bit of shit they see in a commercial.
I don't know much about a BMW - but Harley? Please..... Overhyped outdated bullshit technology. It's a shame that all the rest of the bike manufacturers have switched over to building that stupid V-twin. I rode KZ's all through the '80's. On one bike, I rode 25,000 miles in two years, with one breakdown. The coil gave out. You're simply not going to find many Harley Davidson bikes with that kind of mileage and that kind of record.
And, like a couple other posters have pointed out: half or more of the HD bikes in this country are owned by accountants, dentists, and other professionals who use the damned things like "cafe racers". Change out of a suit, into the leather costume, ease the old hawg down close to the bar, then make a lot of noise coming into the parking lot so that everyone sees you. Wow, what a rush! Talk about macho!! After visiting two or three bars, the bike goes back into the garage, where it gets another unneeded coat of polish, just to sit until the owner feel the need to prove his manhood again.
Give me a KZ 900. It isn't very loud - well, most of the time - but that thing will carry you coast to coast comfortably and reliably. If you just HAVE to hear the thunder, crank the throttle, and listen to the sound of REAL power!
Harley? Phhht. If someone were to give me one, for free, I would just trade it in on something else. A stripped down Harley costs about twice as much as a full dressed anything else!!
Whoa, dude. GP is more on target than you seem to realize. Islamic extremists weren't tolerated very much in the Ottoman empire. They simply weren't tolerated. England was the single greatest factor in the destruction of the Ottoman. After that wonderful accomplishment, England was the single greatest force in redrawing national boundaries - INCLUDING the much fought over Israeli and Palestinian boundaries. Balfour?
No matter which side of that issue you may stand on, you could bother yourself to read a little history. Well - maybe a lot of history. The mideast situation didn't develop overnight, nor did it develop in a vacuum. And, sadly, that entire segment of history is missing from history classes in the public school system in the US.
"you made your post in English."
You say that like it's a good thing. Let us all be grateful for these linguistic abortions:
1) The bandage was wound around the wound.
2) The farm was used to produce produce .
3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse ..
4) We must polish the Polish furniture.
5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.
6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
7) Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time
to present the present.
8) A bass was painted on the head of the bass drum.
9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
13) They were too close to the door to close it.
14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.
15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
18) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
19) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
20) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
If for no other reason, then the telcos have accepted a lot of government funding in the past which was intended to finish that "last mile". Instead of doing so, the telcos have crisscrossed each other's wires in the most lucrative market areas, oversaturating those areas, attempting to cut each other's throats.
When Cheney "lets it go", sure. Get the babbling fool off of television, the radio, and the internet.
AT&T needs to spend that 18 billion on the "last mile". That 3G network is fine and dandy, but they are neglecting to serve millions of Americans who don't have anything better than dialup.
Yeah, I have DSL now - but my sister in law just a couple miles down the highway still can't get it.
Get a clue, dude. Cheney isn't "gone". Every week he gets his goober on television, doing yet another interview, attacking the current president of the United States. When Cheney is gone, maybe we can stop badmouthing him.
"Team building exercises are a blight on co-operation."
Agreed. I always feel like the misanthrope when something like that comes along. The people I work with have never been anywhere, they've never done anything, they don't read anything (assuming they are actually literate), and they have no clue what's happening around them. But, we're all supposed to make nice and say sweet thing about each other, and be "understanding". Phhhht.
The less I know about most of them, the more I can pretend that I respect them. Management should leave well enough alone.
Not a bad idea. Not real good, but not bad. It would take some real changes in the way kids are educated. The K-12 crap needs to be half scrapped. The No Child Left Behind needs to die. Seperate education paths, starting in Kiddiegarden. You start on the fast-track to higher education, and you stay there, til you wash out. The best performers finish high school in 6, 7, or 8 years. You know the kids I'm talking about, there are millions of them. School does nothing but hold them back. Get those kids into college between ages 12 and 15, where they can find some REAL challenges. Then, you continue to challenge them.
Yes, if we took education seriously, I can see that research could be left to the universities.
This won't happen any time soon though. My youngest was denied the opportunity to take Calculus because he hadn't completed a prerequisite. The principal admits that the kid understands the concepts, but he can't take the class for lack of a prereq, which he obviously has already mastered, ON HIS OWN. We are looking at the "body count" by which schools get their revenues. A high school doesn't want to give up a student two or three years early, because they won't get PAID for that kid's presence.
Just one more indicator that our beloved capitalistic society is broken.
"There's some heavy handed "Get off my lawn"-ness going on in the article itself."
Quit yer whinin', you young punk. When we moved out of the caves, we had to WALK to the next village to get our packets!! Now get back out into the street where you belong, you're crushing my grass.
Dick Cheney? Oh - wait - we want someone smart enough to make observations and keep journals. And, there's a good chance that there is no one to torture up there.......
15 years is longer than I had stated - but I could live with it. Perhaps I hadn't made it clear that I thought copyright law is at least as perverse as patent law. I'm over 50 years old, and music older than I am is still under copyright. There is something terribly wrong with that idea. Not merely wrong - it's completely irrational! The people who wrote that music are dead and gone, for the most part. The people who performed it are dead and gone in many cases. But, some corporation "owns" the song. Absurd.