Who cares when your artificially and ridiculously low data cap is exceeded in 5 minutes?
At 800 Gbps you would blow through AT&T's most expensive ($375/mo) shared data plan of 100GB of data in one second.
Well, to be fair, it would probably take longer than that due to other constraints. On a mobile phone, it's not uncommon for my LTE signal to be faster than the write speed of my MicroSD card. No hard disk or SSD could write data that fast; even RAM would be a bit of a challenge to get to write all 800gbits in one second because the bus speeds on the motherboards don't usually shuffle data around that fast.
Yes, we're dealing with theoreticals here, but let's at least give credit to the fact that if it were possible that AT&T could get us 800gbits/sec, we'd be thanking the hardware companies for making sure that it took longer for us to hit the limit.
I'm only half-kidding. over the past year or two, there's been a nifty cottage industry of small storefronts that perform screen replacements on cell phones. If that number gets cut in half, things are going to get interesting for these store owners. Also, if the phones are not only more shatter resistant but scratch resistant as well, I wonder if it would (forgive the pun) make a dent in sales of Otterbox and other impact resistant cases. Not only would this impact Otter Products, but also many retailers, since cases tend to be a high-margin upsell, so their profits would slip.
Similarly, I wonder if the new glass will be reflected in Asurion premiums. If they're replacing statistically half the phones (I'll believe the "2x" number rather than the "10x" number for the sake of this post), shouldn't the premiums reflect this as the company is taking a lower risk? I know the general thinking is "zomg moar hookerz for the see-ee-ohes!!!111", but I generally don't know if there's some legislative edict that requires insurance premiums to reflect the risk being taken.
I'd love to be able to assist with this project. However, my issue is not advertising, but tracking. By using this method, one must, by definition, allow Google to see how many times you visit which sites, and how much time you spend on each.
Presently, I use FoolDNS and Ghostery, and intentionally allow ads through - I want websites to be able to get additional ad traffic. I'm perfectly okay with ads. Personally, I've got two rules: 1.) Don't track me, and 2.) Don't infect my computer with malware. I personally think that these are very reasonable requests to make.
Aunt Google will never make a system that doesn't involve tracking me. If the EFF or ACLU wants to make a system like this, I'll sign up tomorrow, NO problem. Google? I'll stick to giving them as little information as I can.
Not much of a "cloud" if it doesn't support clustering.
7.0.2 does support clustering - in theory. In practice, I've only got one device worth using as a server, so I haven't personally tested it out...but clustering is in its entry stages.
I will say though that OwnCloud is better at syncing phone-> server than BT Sync, as well as sharing files (just give 'em a URL). OwnCloud's shortcoming, at this time, is dealing with large quantities of files. It seems to throw up rather spectacularly if you're syncing a folder with north of 10,000 files, while BT Sync seems to happily do an order of magnitude higher.
One thing I do like observing from a distance is Pydio, which looks like it has some potential if it can streamline its desktop sync application.
The service rotates around features available (read the article) plus support. Do you expect free support if you are a company? Do you expect them to provide everything for free?
I can't speak for the GP, but I do agree with him to a significant extent. Allow me to elaborate...
Dropbox/GDrive/1Drive charges a subscription to keep devices synchronized, as well as a slice of storage space in their datacenter. They pay for bandwidth and hard drives, and forward a chunk of that cost to me. This makes perfect sense. Their advantages are that they are keeping a copy of your data on their hard disks (in the event of a catastrophic failure on your end) and the fact that they don't require all devices to be online concurrently; each device pulls and pushes new stuff when it connects.
BT Sync's major advantage over these services is essentially the opposite: while devices need to be online concurrently, they don't require a centralized server, though BT Sync provides one for NAT traversal and similar. Even with their tracker and DHT services fully disabled, their bills are a small fraction of Dropbox and friends because they're not actually shuffling data around. But yes, even these cost money. Fine. It's still possible to sync over a LAN, or a slightly-configured WAN connection, without ever touching their servers.
I'm completely fine with them needing to charge for the software - it's a great utility that I really like. Neither the summary nor the article do a good job at explaining what would be the difference between the free and paid version. "Support" is a great answer, and I'm definitely in favor of that. However, is it *only* support? The nature of this program means that per-device licenses get pretty expensive, pretty quickly. I've got a few friends who sync to my FreeNAS. If it's $40/year/device, that's $360/year...and they only "support" I've ever needed involved Google searching and feature requests in the forums. $40/node for a perpetual license is a smidge steep, but I'd be somewhat-more-willing to pay it...but the annual price tag is on par with other services that offer storage and lots more bandwidth usage, making Sync a whole lot less competitive. The fact that it's a subscription cost with no clear benefit over simply keeping the older versions running, or using an alternative application, is a viable concern.
tl;dr: no one owes me anything for free, but the cost their looking for isn't matched with a good comparison against either their current free offering or competing products that have a known and significantly higher overhead.
Star Trek Voyager: Say what you will about the series as a whole (admittedly having problems whose root cause starts with the words "Brannon" and "Braga"), but Janeway generally had the respect of her crew, spoke to the other female characters about whatever the relevant topic was (engineering, Seven of Nine's character development, etc.), and ultimately got her crew home.
Mass Effect: FemShep does her thing the same way male Shepard does, by diplomacy, by 'bigger gun diplomacy', or both. She speaks to whoever she wants, however she wants, and gains the respect of virtually everyone she crosses paths with...ironically, most anti-Shepard sentiment is based upon her being a human, not her being a female.
Metroid: you kick butt the entire game and THEN find out that Samus is a girl.
Clearly not an exhausive list, but off the top of my head, there ARE examples of strong female protagonists that aren't vapid caricatures.
What makes a game fun and engaging is, primarily, the gameplay mechanism. Movies are non-interactive and have no gameplay mechanisms. Therefore, they have little of value to offer to a licensed game. Yes, you can take a generic, well-proven game mechanic and slap on a movie-colored coat of paint, but it means nothing. It may possibly turn out to be an OK game, but there's no reason to expect it to surpass games that were designed as their own properties from the outset.
It's even more difficult than that. Movies like "Star Wars" lend themselves to video games, because it's "an expansive universe in which stuff happens, including the movie". Tie Fighter Wars was a fun game because you were flying a Tie Fighter, and shooting other ships. The movie tie-in was "the ship you were flying" and "the ship you were shooting". "Jedi Knight" was a fun game because you were using blasters, thermal detonators, and lightsabers in an FPS - they also kept the costumes, force powers, and good/bad guy entities, but you didn't actually play through anything that happened in the movies.
Movie-based games that don't involve an expansive universe like Star Wars or Star Trek are a bit stuck in that players need to be able to see things that happened in the movie, and somehow participate, while still advancing to the next movie scene that needs to be added. Thus, we end up with a very "on the rails" situation of leaving users to "do something" that will involve them doing what the protagonist did, but somehow making the player responsible for it, without making the game a movie itself. It doesn't need to be a Mass Effect decision tree, but it's the RARE gem of a game that's directly based on a movie (instead of tangentially so) that has a core gameplay worth playing.
Finally, movie-based games tend to happen more toward the lower end of the MPAA rating system than the higher end. It's amazingly difficult to make a Toy Story game that's fun to play, and is also easy for children to play, that doesn't simply end up being a platformer like every other children's game.
On the other hand, since movie tie-in games tend to find themselves more on the mobile side of things these days, we end up with games like "Temple Run: Brave" and "Angry Birds: Star Wars", which seem to do alright. They're certainly not new, but they don't have to justify a $40-$60 price tag, either.
Just kills me that all of Linuxdom does without Pinch-to-Zoom (2 finger gestures) on a touchpad. All modern laptops (including Win8) have this feature but Linux skewers it in the butt.
OSX is its own vertical silo, so the hardware/software/driver/OS integration is completely seamless - it's the benefit of the Apple approach. Windows 8 kinda-sorta has this, but for the most part those gestures are handled by the Synaptics drivers and software, and are configured as such. In other words, Windows 8 will see a touchpad as a garden variety 2-button mouse. If you want pinch-zoom, swiping, and all that other crap that I disabled on my touchpad anyway (except edge scrolling), it's all a result of closed source Synaptic driver magic.
Jury nullification might not be illegal but it'll get you into a lot of trouble in the USA.
Jury nullification, in itself, isn't going to get you in trouble. Getting on a jury with an intent to nullify, and answering 'no' to a question like "do you have any beliefs that would make it difficult for you to make an unbiased decision?", however, is perjury...and you'll still need the 11 other Angry Men to agree that the defendant is 1.) guilty, but 2.) shouldn't be punished, and 3.) it's a good idea to give a 'not guilty' verdict regardless of what the evidence is.
On the other hand, the judge disregarding the jury's decision would be a nifty tidbit to bring up in appeals court. The jury can say whatever they want, which is why they exist, and why they can't be punished for a 'wrong' verdict. If the defense says "The jury gave a unanimous 'not guilty' verdict, but the judge decided that they were wrong, so he overruled them", there may be grounds for a retrial or something...but I too am not a lawyer.
If people don't want Google to have their info, Then why are they signed into Google?
It's not always that simple with Aunt Google. If you have logged into Gmail with your browser, you're logged into Google. If you close the tab without explicitly signing out, you're logged into Google, and when you go Maps next week, you'll be logged in still. Even if you sign out, Google still seems to keep enough of a session cookie lying around that it shows you the last person to log in, so you just need your password. Depending on how tight your tin foil hat is, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that Google is still tracking the movements based on that session cookie, so it's entirely possible that the logic goes "IF user_signed_in='false' THEN display_map_data='false'", rather than "IF user_signed_in='false' THEN collect_map_data='false'".
On Android, it's even worse. Apparently, the folks at Google don't seem to have a concept of "I just want to buy apps, nothing more, nothing less". It's impossible to get apps from Google Play without tying the phone to an account. Fair enough...but that also logs you into Gmail, keeps your search history synced with your account, syncs your contacts, and keeps your avatar on Youtube. I generally don't use Google Maps, but I did do so once a few months ago. I didn't explicitly sign into it, nor was I prompted for it...but when I got curious two months later, I went back through my 'travel history', and I saw exactly the routes I took, and exactly the times I took them. There is *NO* reason why that kind of data collection shouldn't be explicitly opt-in. Finally, you wouldn't believe how naggy Android is if you don't have a Google account tied to it. I'd liken it to Clippy in a new outfit, but that's an insult to Clippy - at least Clippy was intended to provide actual assistance to users.
The only way I've been able to feel reasonably certain that Google isn't collecting this kind of data is to root my phone, gut my phone of all the Google apps except the Play Store and Play Services, and then use Xprivacy to deny access to contact/calendar/location/etc. data to both.
I pine for a viable alternative to Aunt Google....
My chief problem is I'm hopelessly conflicted over which group of assholes I want to win and which group of assholes I want to lose.
Well golly gee! It's not like there's not a choice of "none of the above". Ah, but, *Give me convenience, or give me death*:-)
At first I was going to mod this up, but then I thought a bit more about it. Let me give you a better example of what the grandparent was likely getting at:
Let's face it, I sincerely doubt that ANY slashdotter uses Realplayer on a regular basis. Most of us file it under "relics of the 90's" or "squandered tech opportunities" or something similar. Had RealNetworks won that case, I sincerely doubt anyone here would have actually purchased or used this application. However, this court case was one where many of us were hoping that RealNetworks would win - not for the amazing software or for the continued growth of RealNetworks, but for the court precedent. If RealNetworks won, it would be the first piece to fall of the problem of legislatively backed DRM. The war would continue, of course, but it would be a start.
I can't speak for the GP, but I concur with his sentiment. I don't think that Apple, Google, or these retailers have my best interest at heart. Not in the slightest. However, they all want the same thing: money. Apple seems generally better about not directly selling marketing data, but there's also no guarantee that they're not doing it under the table. Even without the tin foil hat, Apple may keep all that data in-house, and if iCloud security is any indication, that database security is questionable. Aunt Google, we all know, sells marketing data - they compete just as much with ClearChannel as they do with Microsoft - arguably more so. Retailers have their own science about how to psychologically manipulate you to buy stuff in their store. Apple may be the 'least offensive' in this lineup since their biggest crime is still a matter of speculation, but they're still no saint, even by corporate standards.
Thus, we have ourselves a bit of a conundrum. Even if you and I continue to use cash, the order invariably goes "opt-in, opt-out, alternatives disincentivized, alternatives socially unacceptable, alternatives impossible/illegal". Thus, the question becomes "who do we want blazing that trail?" That's the true question being asked by the GP, and unfortunately, I agree.
Is that seriously a federal law now? "Real-time traffic information" has been available on the radio since my grandfather was driving. Waze, Google Maps, and virtually every other software-based GPS provides traffic information. Can we all agree that this is allowed to be filed under "completely useless legislation"?
1.) buy airplane tickets, most likely by credit card (I'm sure there's some way to use cash to pay for airplane tickets, but I don't know a single person who's done that in a decade). These tickets give a very good probability as to where you are going to be, when. 2.) check in - in other words, directly inform the airline that you are at the airport. 3.) get onto a line whose exit involves partial undress (shoes, belts, jackets), placing your personal effects on a conveyor belt to be searched, and an X-Ray of your body....so now they're using the MACs of cell phones to figure out how long people are going to be in the queue, and we're worried about "privacy concerns"? You're in the wrong place if you're worried about privacy in the security line at an airport.
You could stay with Win 7 until they stop doing security updates, and then hide it from the scary internet inside a virtual machine that has gpu passthrough (nvidia vgx or amd vdi) and is defined not to have a network adapter. Windows will run your games and never know that the world outside has moved on.
...and exactly how many games run without an internet connection these days?
Depends where you look. Many major topics have moderated groups. misc.legal.moderated has lots of interesting information in it. rec.arts.drwho.moderated also has some insteresting discussions. Surprisingly, misc.phone.mobile.iphone has lots of posts and barely any spam; one wouldn't normally think of iPhone users as usenet users, but apparently there's plenty. alt.os.linux.* has some great discussions in it;.mint and.ubuntu are both pretty active. There's plenty of spam to be found, don't worry - but most of it ends up in inactive groups and is generally recognizable. Conversely, much of the spamming seems to have subsided - with the relatively small number of people using it in comparison to Facebook or Kik messenger, and those that do being the kinds of people who are going to be able to download and configure Pan or Agent and find a Usenet provider, the 'intelligence floor' for getting in is generally higher than the 'gullibility ceiling' required for a spam campaign to be terribly useful.
The details of what they're looking to do is a bit vague, and it depends on what the real requirements are. In other words, this is a two part question, and the choke point is vague...
Part 1: Getting the data in the door. I'm a huge fan of Machform for this. It's not free, but it's inexpensive, self-hosted on any garden variety LAMP stack, their support folks are pretty good, and making new forms is a very simple process that you can teach Sally Secretary to do in half an hour. You can download the data in a CSV once the form is done and look at it in your spreadsheet flavor of choice.
Part 2: Doing something useful with the data. So, you've got a spreadsheet full of names, addresses, and phone numbers. What do you do with it? Do you run a Mail Merge in Microsoft Word? nice and easy. Does this go into a SQL database somewhere? Importing it gets interesting, although I think you can export the data from Machform using PhpMyAdmin. Does it need to go into Quickbooks? Good luck with that, although to be fair you'd need half a dozen interns to copy/paste that no matter how you slice it. ConstantContact? I don't know what mass import tools they have, so that can vary. The list of potential use cases goes on and on, and whether this is a practical method or not depends if "data getting into spreadsheet form" is a solution.
It's been said that a well-asked question is half the answer. If you can provide us with more information as to what's done with the data, and where their current solution falls apart, and what specific uniquenesses are limiting the current setup, more solutions may come to light.
What no one has explained to me is why the plane could not just land on the runway in question. The premise was that the planes could not communicate with the tower, so everyone was in a holding pattern.
Once they were able to communicate with the plane in question, why not just tell it to land so they could download the copy of the software while on the ground?
The "Show Logic" was that the runway wasn't long enough for the plane to land without taking out a few blocks in the process.
Why they didn't land at the airport with no ground control was what didn't make sense to me - They can communicate with the pilot and all the runways are clear, so why not just hand someone at LAX the phone, let 'em land, and do everything else via Remote Desktop?
Make sure the tower doesn't have software written by a company that went out of business, but still managed to get an update that can bring the whole thing down, and employ versioning in your datacenter backups...but if that doesn't work, ensure that copies of the software are uploaded to the planes themselves so that, in the event there's a group of socially awkward geniuses that can drive a Ferrari down a landing strip, they can download the software via an Ethernet cable and save everyone.
Local backups, advantages: 1.) Lower cost/GB. 2.) Control over data. 3.) Backups done on demand. 4.) Multiple users/devices can be backed up on the same drive.
Local backups, disadvantages: 1.) Backup of mobile devices gets interesting. 2.) Backup schedule needs to be adhered to; most people forget until the day after they need it. 3.) Cost/GB narrows if more than one external disk is purchased to protect against disk failure. 4.) Opportunity cost - performing backups take time and some level of technical expertise.
Cloud backups, advantages: 1.) Streamlined and convenient, so they're generally actually performed. 2.) Realtime backup, usually including versioning. 3.) Simple to do on all form factors. 4.) Additional benefits - sharing, access from other devices, etc.
Cloud backups, disadvantages: 1.) No recourse if data is lost or "shared" on the provider's end. 2.) Necessity of trust that the cloud provider will honor their Super Pinky Promise to not sell your data to the highest bidder. 3.) No guarantee that the cost won't double tomorrow. 4.) Backups make messes of data transfer quotas. 5.) Initial transfer / complete data recovery can take a VERY long time.
Now, the first three Cloud disadvantages can be somewhat mitigated by a decent SLA, but consumer grade cloud services aren't going to have a decent one, and a company who signs an agreement to be sued into oblivion for technical mishaps will be prohibitively expensive for end users - and even then, it boils down to enforcement. Voyager529 Cloud Services, Inc. goes into contract with Jason Levine for cloud backups. 99.999% uptime, no data gets out, and $25/month for 1TB for life, no matter what. Next month, my colo goes belly up overnight, and the servers with your data on it get sold at auction for $50. I file bankruptcy. Go ahead and sue me - you probably won't see your money, and you definitely won't see your data.
It's for these reasons (and others) that I agree with you and do all my own personal backups on my own hard drives, and give an undesirable hand gesture to The Cloud (tm). For the majority of people though, the Saturday spent shopping at Microcenter for parts, 2-3 hours unboxing and assembling their own FreeNAS, installing the software, configuring the storage array, and port forwarding in their router like I did, just isn't worth the hassle. As much as I'd rather people do that (or even get a WD MyCloud), I'm begrudgingly happy that Dropbox and Google Drive and iCloud are all getting better traction because, even though Google/Amazon/Microsoft end up with plenty of that data, for most people, they actually have backups.
I have no idea if they have a means to stop a recording being played back though - that's presumably a harder problem to solve.
"For verification, please say the following words out loud: Propeller. Spinach. Fiberglass. Indonesia."
The system chooses randomly from a list of thousands of words that are easy for an individual to repeat back, but highly unlikely to be recorded and readily accessible to someone using a set of recordings to fool the system.
What we really need is some kind of standardized identity management system-- like you know how you can sign onto various sites using either your Facebook or Google+ sign-on? Like that, but standardized. We need a true single-sign-on solution that is easy to manage, hard to screw up and lose your identity permanently, and usable everywhere.
This has been obvious for well over a decade, but we can't do it because we don't create standards anymore. For any solution, Microsoft wants to have their solution, Facebook wants theirs, Google wants to do it their own way, and Apple wants to do something different from all the rest. Each company pretty much wants a solution that will benefit themselves and screw over their competitors. None are really focused on creating the best solution for social/economic/computing progress, and if they were, it would still be impossible to get others on board. So that's the real problem. Unwillingness to create standards.
I completely agree with this - and it gets even worse: who gets trusted? SSO works in a corporate Windows domain because the answer to "who gets trusted" is "the company's internal systems...and it's the company's data anyway." Logging into the company's AD/Exchange/Sharepoint is just fine, because the systems authenticating stuff and the systems storing stuff are effectively the same.
Now on the greater internet, who do we trust? I have a friend who trusts Apple with basically everything, a friend who trusts Google with literally everything, a friend who trusts Microsoft with more of everything than not, and me, who trusts my own systems and no one else's. You own Nine-Times.com, a vBulletin forum for cat enthusiasts. You trust Google and Apple, but not Microsoft. two friends can SSO in, the other two of us can make internal accounts for the forum. Google friend owns androidfanbois.com, another vBulletin site. He allows Google's SSO. Three of us need accounts now.
So, we then do something like the US Federal Government having a standardized "internet identity", available to anyone who wants it. Well, we can forego corporate fanaticism this way, but now we've legislated digital identities and said goodbye to even the illusion of anonymity, and have a digital treasure trove of data for not only hackers and identity thieves (do you REALLY think the federal government is going to have bulletproof security on this thing?), but now you tell me that the NSA isn't tapping all of *that* "metadata", and I've got a password storage device for you. More to the point, if you google 'voyager529', you will indeed see my photo in the very first set of image results, and have a pretty good idea of who I am and what I do. I have a completely separate digital identity that is *not* tied to 'voyager529' in any sense.If the federal government gets in the online identity business, I sincerely doubt I'd get two.
We've eliminated corporate, and we've eliminated government, which leaves us with two obviously-even-worse options: self-signing and crowdsourcing. Self-signing gives us no real concept of who the person is, which is why Usenet devolved into the spam garden it is today. Requiring X number of people already joined to a website to validate that you are who you say you are turns logging into stuff into a popularity contest.
Passwords get stuck to monitors and under keyboards. Password managers are treasure troves to compromise and aren't cross compliant. Possession-based authentication (RFID card, NFC/Cell phone, etc.) makes losing your wallet ten times worse and you still need an issuing authority to oversee unique cards tied to a particular human. Biometrics are nice, but cross-device biometrics still have the problems of password managers, and having all ten fingers enrolled is a good idea, because one lapse in tomato slicing safety precautions and you won't be accessing your Gmail for a week.
No matter how we slice it, "proving that a person is the correct person on the internet" is a problem inherently
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Who cares when your artificially and ridiculously low data cap is exceeded in 5 minutes?
At 800 Gbps you would blow through AT&T's most expensive ($375/mo) shared data plan of 100GB of data in one second.
Well, to be fair, it would probably take longer than that due to other constraints. On a mobile phone, it's not uncommon for my LTE signal to be faster than the write speed of my MicroSD card. No hard disk or SSD could write data that fast; even RAM would be a bit of a challenge to get to write all 800gbits in one second because the bus speeds on the motherboards don't usually shuffle data around that fast.
Yes, we're dealing with theoreticals here, but let's at least give credit to the fact that if it were possible that AT&T could get us 800gbits/sec, we'd be thanking the hardware companies for making sure that it took longer for us to hit the limit.
I'm only half-kidding. over the past year or two, there's been a nifty cottage industry of small storefronts that perform screen replacements on cell phones. If that number gets cut in half, things are going to get interesting for these store owners. Also, if the phones are not only more shatter resistant but scratch resistant as well, I wonder if it would (forgive the pun) make a dent in sales of Otterbox and other impact resistant cases. Not only would this impact Otter Products, but also many retailers, since cases tend to be a high-margin upsell, so their profits would slip.
Similarly, I wonder if the new glass will be reflected in Asurion premiums. If they're replacing statistically half the phones (I'll believe the "2x" number rather than the "10x" number for the sake of this post), shouldn't the premiums reflect this as the company is taking a lower risk? I know the general thinking is "zomg moar hookerz for the see-ee-ohes!!!111", but I generally don't know if there's some legislative edict that requires insurance premiums to reflect the risk being taken.
I'd love to be able to assist with this project. However, my issue is not advertising, but tracking. By using this method, one must, by definition, allow Google to see how many times you visit which sites, and how much time you spend on each.
Presently, I use FoolDNS and Ghostery, and intentionally allow ads through - I want websites to be able to get additional ad traffic. I'm perfectly okay with ads. Personally, I've got two rules: 1.) Don't track me, and 2.) Don't infect my computer with malware. I personally think that these are very reasonable requests to make.
Aunt Google will never make a system that doesn't involve tracking me. If the EFF or ACLU wants to make a system like this, I'll sign up tomorrow, NO problem. Google? I'll stick to giving them as little information as I can.
Not much of a "cloud" if it doesn't support clustering.
7.0.2 does support clustering - in theory. In practice, I've only got one device worth using as a server, so I haven't personally tested it out...but clustering is in its entry stages.
I will say though that OwnCloud is better at syncing phone-> server than BT Sync, as well as sharing files (just give 'em a URL). OwnCloud's shortcoming, at this time, is dealing with large quantities of files. It seems to throw up rather spectacularly if you're syncing a folder with north of 10,000 files, while BT Sync seems to happily do an order of magnitude higher.
One thing I do like observing from a distance is Pydio, which looks like it has some potential if it can streamline its desktop sync application.
The service rotates around features available (read the article) plus support. Do you expect free support if you are a company? Do you expect them to provide everything for free?
I can't speak for the GP, but I do agree with him to a significant extent. Allow me to elaborate...
Dropbox/GDrive/1Drive charges a subscription to keep devices synchronized, as well as a slice of storage space in their datacenter. They pay for bandwidth and hard drives, and forward a chunk of that cost to me. This makes perfect sense. Their advantages are that they are keeping a copy of your data on their hard disks (in the event of a catastrophic failure on your end) and the fact that they don't require all devices to be online concurrently; each device pulls and pushes new stuff when it connects.
BT Sync's major advantage over these services is essentially the opposite: while devices need to be online concurrently, they don't require a centralized server, though BT Sync provides one for NAT traversal and similar. Even with their tracker and DHT services fully disabled, their bills are a small fraction of Dropbox and friends because they're not actually shuffling data around. But yes, even these cost money. Fine. It's still possible to sync over a LAN, or a slightly-configured WAN connection, without ever touching their servers.
I'm completely fine with them needing to charge for the software - it's a great utility that I really like. Neither the summary nor the article do a good job at explaining what would be the difference between the free and paid version. "Support" is a great answer, and I'm definitely in favor of that. However, is it *only* support? The nature of this program means that per-device licenses get pretty expensive, pretty quickly. I've got a few friends who sync to my FreeNAS. If it's $40/year/device, that's $360/year...and they only "support" I've ever needed involved Google searching and feature requests in the forums. $40/node for a perpetual license is a smidge steep, but I'd be somewhat-more-willing to pay it...but the annual price tag is on par with other services that offer storage and lots more bandwidth usage, making Sync a whole lot less competitive. The fact that it's a subscription cost with no clear benefit over simply keeping the older versions running, or using an alternative application, is a viable concern.
tl;dr: no one owes me anything for free, but the cost their looking for isn't matched with a good comparison against either their current free offering or competing products that have a known and significantly higher overhead.
Star Trek Voyager: Say what you will about the series as a whole (admittedly having problems whose root cause starts with the words "Brannon" and "Braga"), but Janeway generally had the respect of her crew, spoke to the other female characters about whatever the relevant topic was (engineering, Seven of Nine's character development, etc.), and ultimately got her crew home.
Mass Effect: FemShep does her thing the same way male Shepard does, by diplomacy, by 'bigger gun diplomacy', or both. She speaks to whoever she wants, however she wants, and gains the respect of virtually everyone she crosses paths with...ironically, most anti-Shepard sentiment is based upon her being a human, not her being a female.
Metroid: you kick butt the entire game and THEN find out that Samus is a girl.
Clearly not an exhausive list, but off the top of my head, there ARE examples of strong female protagonists that aren't vapid caricatures.
What makes a game fun and engaging is, primarily, the gameplay mechanism. Movies are non-interactive and have no gameplay mechanisms. Therefore, they have little of value to offer to a licensed game. Yes, you can take a generic, well-proven game mechanic and slap on a movie-colored coat of paint, but it means nothing. It may possibly turn out to be an OK game, but there's no reason to expect it to surpass games that were designed as their own properties from the outset.
It's even more difficult than that. Movies like "Star Wars" lend themselves to video games, because it's "an expansive universe in which stuff happens, including the movie". Tie Fighter Wars was a fun game because you were flying a Tie Fighter, and shooting other ships. The movie tie-in was "the ship you were flying" and "the ship you were shooting". "Jedi Knight" was a fun game because you were using blasters, thermal detonators, and lightsabers in an FPS - they also kept the costumes, force powers, and good/bad guy entities, but you didn't actually play through anything that happened in the movies.
Movie-based games that don't involve an expansive universe like Star Wars or Star Trek are a bit stuck in that players need to be able to see things that happened in the movie, and somehow participate, while still advancing to the next movie scene that needs to be added. Thus, we end up with a very "on the rails" situation of leaving users to "do something" that will involve them doing what the protagonist did, but somehow making the player responsible for it, without making the game a movie itself. It doesn't need to be a Mass Effect decision tree, but it's the RARE gem of a game that's directly based on a movie (instead of tangentially so) that has a core gameplay worth playing.
Finally, movie-based games tend to happen more toward the lower end of the MPAA rating system than the higher end. It's amazingly difficult to make a Toy Story game that's fun to play, and is also easy for children to play, that doesn't simply end up being a platformer like every other children's game.
On the other hand, since movie tie-in games tend to find themselves more on the mobile side of things these days, we end up with games like "Temple Run: Brave" and "Angry Birds: Star Wars", which seem to do alright. They're certainly not new, but they don't have to justify a $40-$60 price tag, either.
Just kills me that all of Linuxdom does without Pinch-to-Zoom (2 finger gestures) on a touchpad. All modern laptops (including Win8) have this feature but Linux skewers it in the butt.
OSX is its own vertical silo, so the hardware/software/driver/OS integration is completely seamless - it's the benefit of the Apple approach. Windows 8 kinda-sorta has this, but for the most part those gestures are handled by the Synaptics drivers and software, and are configured as such. In other words, Windows 8 will see a touchpad as a garden variety 2-button mouse. If you want pinch-zoom, swiping, and all that other crap that I disabled on my touchpad anyway (except edge scrolling), it's all a result of closed source Synaptic driver magic.
Jury nullification might not be illegal but it'll get you into a lot of trouble in the USA.
Jury nullification, in itself, isn't going to get you in trouble. Getting on a jury with an intent to nullify, and answering 'no' to a question like "do you have any beliefs that would make it difficult for you to make an unbiased decision?", however, is perjury...and you'll still need the 11 other Angry Men to agree that the defendant is 1.) guilty, but 2.) shouldn't be punished, and 3.) it's a good idea to give a 'not guilty' verdict regardless of what the evidence is.
On the other hand, the judge disregarding the jury's decision would be a nifty tidbit to bring up in appeals court. The jury can say whatever they want, which is why they exist, and why they can't be punished for a 'wrong' verdict. If the defense says "The jury gave a unanimous 'not guilty' verdict, but the judge decided that they were wrong, so he overruled them", there may be grounds for a retrial or something...but I too am not a lawyer.
If people don't want Google to have their info, Then why are they signed into Google?
It's not always that simple with Aunt Google. If you have logged into Gmail with your browser, you're logged into Google. If you close the tab without explicitly signing out, you're logged into Google, and when you go Maps next week, you'll be logged in still. Even if you sign out, Google still seems to keep enough of a session cookie lying around that it shows you the last person to log in, so you just need your password. Depending on how tight your tin foil hat is, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that Google is still tracking the movements based on that session cookie, so it's entirely possible that the logic goes "IF user_signed_in='false' THEN display_map_data='false'", rather than "IF user_signed_in='false' THEN collect_map_data='false'".
On Android, it's even worse. Apparently, the folks at Google don't seem to have a concept of "I just want to buy apps, nothing more, nothing less". It's impossible to get apps from Google Play without tying the phone to an account. Fair enough...but that also logs you into Gmail, keeps your search history synced with your account, syncs your contacts, and keeps your avatar on Youtube. I generally don't use Google Maps, but I did do so once a few months ago. I didn't explicitly sign into it, nor was I prompted for it...but when I got curious two months later, I went back through my 'travel history', and I saw exactly the routes I took, and exactly the times I took them. There is *NO* reason why that kind of data collection shouldn't be explicitly opt-in. Finally, you wouldn't believe how naggy Android is if you don't have a Google account tied to it. I'd liken it to Clippy in a new outfit, but that's an insult to Clippy - at least Clippy was intended to provide actual assistance to users.
The only way I've been able to feel reasonably certain that Google isn't collecting this kind of data is to root my phone, gut my phone of all the Google apps except the Play Store and Play Services, and then use Xprivacy to deny access to contact/calendar/location/etc. data to both.
I pine for a viable alternative to Aunt Google....
My chief problem is I'm hopelessly conflicted over which group of assholes I want to win and which group of assholes I want to lose.
Well golly gee! It's not like there's not a choice of "none of the above". Ah, but, *Give me convenience, or give me death* :-)
At first I was going to mod this up, but then I thought a bit more about it. Let me give you a better example of what the grandparent was likely getting at:
RealNetworks, Inc. v. DVD Copy Control Association, Inc.
Let's face it, I sincerely doubt that ANY slashdotter uses Realplayer on a regular basis. Most of us file it under "relics of the 90's" or "squandered tech opportunities" or something similar. Had RealNetworks won that case, I sincerely doubt anyone here would have actually purchased or used this application. However, this court case was one where many of us were hoping that RealNetworks would win - not for the amazing software or for the continued growth of RealNetworks, but for the court precedent. If RealNetworks won, it would be the first piece to fall of the problem of legislatively backed DRM. The war would continue, of course, but it would be a start.
I can't speak for the GP, but I concur with his sentiment. I don't think that Apple, Google, or these retailers have my best interest at heart. Not in the slightest. However, they all want the same thing: money. Apple seems generally better about not directly selling marketing data, but there's also no guarantee that they're not doing it under the table. Even without the tin foil hat, Apple may keep all that data in-house, and if iCloud security is any indication, that database security is questionable. Aunt Google, we all know, sells marketing data - they compete just as much with ClearChannel as they do with Microsoft - arguably more so. Retailers have their own science about how to psychologically manipulate you to buy stuff in their store. Apple may be the 'least offensive' in this lineup since their biggest crime is still a matter of speculation, but they're still no saint, even by corporate standards.
Thus, we have ourselves a bit of a conundrum. Even if you and I continue to use cash, the order invariably goes "opt-in, opt-out, alternatives disincentivized, alternatives socially unacceptable, alternatives impossible/illegal". Thus, the question becomes "who do we want blazing that trail?" That's the true question being asked by the GP, and unfortunately, I agree.
Why does Elon Musk have a competing payment processor?
Because before he started Tesla, he started Paypal.
Not when nobody with more than 2 brain cells will use it.
From the summary:
Therefore, we can reasonably assume that CurrentC will take off like wildfire.
Is that seriously a federal law now? "Real-time traffic information" has been available on the radio since my grandfather was driving. Waze, Google Maps, and virtually every other software-based GPS provides traffic information. Can we all agree that this is allowed to be filed under "completely useless legislation"?
To get to that point, one has to:
1.) buy airplane tickets, most likely by credit card (I'm sure there's some way to use cash to pay for airplane tickets, but I don't know a single person who's done that in a decade). These tickets give a very good probability as to where you are going to be, when. ...so now they're using the MACs of cell phones to figure out how long people are going to be in the queue, and we're worried about "privacy concerns"? You're in the wrong place if you're worried about privacy in the security line at an airport.
2.) check in - in other words, directly inform the airline that you are at the airport.
3.) get onto a line whose exit involves partial undress (shoes, belts, jackets), placing your personal effects on a conveyor belt to be searched, and an X-Ray of your body.
You could stay with Win 7 until they stop doing security updates, and then hide it from the scary internet inside a virtual machine that has gpu passthrough (nvidia vgx or amd vdi) and is defined not to have a network adapter. Windows will run your games and never know that the world outside has moved on.
...and exactly how many games run without an internet connection these days?
Hasn't USENET been overrun with spammers, though?
Depends where you look. Many major topics have moderated groups. misc.legal.moderated has lots of interesting information in it. rec.arts.drwho.moderated also has some insteresting discussions. Surprisingly, misc.phone.mobile.iphone has lots of posts and barely any spam; one wouldn't normally think of iPhone users as usenet users, but apparently there's plenty. alt.os.linux.* has some great discussions in it; .mint and .ubuntu are both pretty active. There's plenty of spam to be found, don't worry - but most of it ends up in inactive groups and is generally recognizable. Conversely, much of the spamming seems to have subsided - with the relatively small number of people using it in comparison to Facebook or Kik messenger, and those that do being the kinds of people who are going to be able to download and configure Pan or Agent and find a Usenet provider, the 'intelligence floor' for getting in is generally higher than the 'gullibility ceiling' required for a spam campaign to be terribly useful.
The details of what they're looking to do is a bit vague, and it depends on what the real requirements are. In other words, this is a two part question, and the choke point is vague...
Part 1: Getting the data in the door.
I'm a huge fan of Machform for this. It's not free, but it's inexpensive, self-hosted on any garden variety LAMP stack, their support folks are pretty good, and making new forms is a very simple process that you can teach Sally Secretary to do in half an hour. You can download the data in a CSV once the form is done and look at it in your spreadsheet flavor of choice.
Part 2: Doing something useful with the data.
So, you've got a spreadsheet full of names, addresses, and phone numbers. What do you do with it? Do you run a Mail Merge in Microsoft Word? nice and easy. Does this go into a SQL database somewhere? Importing it gets interesting, although I think you can export the data from Machform using PhpMyAdmin. Does it need to go into Quickbooks? Good luck with that, although to be fair you'd need half a dozen interns to copy/paste that no matter how you slice it. ConstantContact? I don't know what mass import tools they have, so that can vary. The list of potential use cases goes on and on, and whether this is a practical method or not depends if "data getting into spreadsheet form" is a solution.
It's been said that a well-asked question is half the answer. If you can provide us with more information as to what's done with the data, and where their current solution falls apart, and what specific uniquenesses are limiting the current setup, more solutions may come to light.
"Microsoft Lumia. Because it will function as a flashlight."
Don't be ridiculous. Flashlights have removable batteries.
What no one has explained to me is why the plane could not just land on the runway in question. The premise was that the planes could not communicate with the tower, so everyone was in a holding pattern.
Once they were able to communicate with the plane in question, why not just tell it to land so they could download the copy of the software while on the ground?
The "Show Logic" was that the runway wasn't long enough for the plane to land without taking out a few blocks in the process.
Why they didn't land at the airport with no ground control was what didn't make sense to me - They can communicate with the pilot and all the runways are clear, so why not just hand someone at LAX the phone, let 'em land, and do everything else via Remote Desktop?
(for those that didn't get the joke: http://collider.com/scorpion-p... )
Make sure the tower doesn't have software written by a company that went out of business, but still managed to get an update that can bring the whole thing down, and employ versioning in your datacenter backups...but if that doesn't work, ensure that copies of the software are uploaded to the planes themselves so that, in the event there's a group of socially awkward geniuses that can drive a Ferrari down a landing strip, they can download the software via an Ethernet cable and save everyone.
Both systems have their advantages and drawbacks:
Local backups, advantages:
1.) Lower cost/GB.
2.) Control over data.
3.) Backups done on demand.
4.) Multiple users/devices can be backed up on the same drive.
Local backups, disadvantages:
1.) Backup of mobile devices gets interesting.
2.) Backup schedule needs to be adhered to; most people forget until the day after they need it.
3.) Cost/GB narrows if more than one external disk is purchased to protect against disk failure.
4.) Opportunity cost - performing backups take time and some level of technical expertise.
Cloud backups, advantages:
1.) Streamlined and convenient, so they're generally actually performed.
2.) Realtime backup, usually including versioning.
3.) Simple to do on all form factors.
4.) Additional benefits - sharing, access from other devices, etc.
Cloud backups, disadvantages:
1.) No recourse if data is lost or "shared" on the provider's end.
2.) Necessity of trust that the cloud provider will honor their Super Pinky Promise to not sell your data to the highest bidder.
3.) No guarantee that the cost won't double tomorrow.
4.) Backups make messes of data transfer quotas.
5.) Initial transfer / complete data recovery can take a VERY long time.
Now, the first three Cloud disadvantages can be somewhat mitigated by a decent SLA, but consumer grade cloud services aren't going to have a decent one, and a company who signs an agreement to be sued into oblivion for technical mishaps will be prohibitively expensive for end users - and even then, it boils down to enforcement. Voyager529 Cloud Services, Inc. goes into contract with Jason Levine for cloud backups. 99.999% uptime, no data gets out, and $25/month for 1TB for life, no matter what. Next month, my colo goes belly up overnight, and the servers with your data on it get sold at auction for $50. I file bankruptcy. Go ahead and sue me - you probably won't see your money, and you definitely won't see your data.
It's for these reasons (and others) that I agree with you and do all my own personal backups on my own hard drives, and give an undesirable hand gesture to The Cloud (tm). For the majority of people though, the Saturday spent shopping at Microcenter for parts, 2-3 hours unboxing and assembling their own FreeNAS, installing the software, configuring the storage array, and port forwarding in their router like I did, just isn't worth the hassle. As much as I'd rather people do that (or even get a WD MyCloud), I'm begrudgingly happy that Dropbox and Google Drive and iCloud are all getting better traction because, even though Google/Amazon/Microsoft end up with plenty of that data, for most people, they actually have backups.
I have no idea if they have a means to stop a recording being played back though - that's presumably a harder problem to solve.
"For verification, please say the following words out loud: Propeller. Spinach. Fiberglass. Indonesia."
The system chooses randomly from a list of thousands of words that are easy for an individual to repeat back, but highly unlikely to be recorded and readily accessible to someone using a set of recordings to fool the system.
What we really need is some kind of standardized identity management system-- like you know how you can sign onto various sites using either your Facebook or Google+ sign-on? Like that, but standardized. We need a true single-sign-on solution that is easy to manage, hard to screw up and lose your identity permanently, and usable everywhere.
This has been obvious for well over a decade, but we can't do it because we don't create standards anymore. For any solution, Microsoft wants to have their solution, Facebook wants theirs, Google wants to do it their own way, and Apple wants to do something different from all the rest. Each company pretty much wants a solution that will benefit themselves and screw over their competitors. None are really focused on creating the best solution for social/economic/computing progress, and if they were, it would still be impossible to get others on board. So that's the real problem. Unwillingness to create standards.
I completely agree with this - and it gets even worse: who gets trusted? SSO works in a corporate Windows domain because the answer to "who gets trusted" is "the company's internal systems...and it's the company's data anyway." Logging into the company's AD/Exchange/Sharepoint is just fine, because the systems authenticating stuff and the systems storing stuff are effectively the same.
Now on the greater internet, who do we trust? I have a friend who trusts Apple with basically everything, a friend who trusts Google with literally everything, a friend who trusts Microsoft with more of everything than not, and me, who trusts my own systems and no one else's. You own Nine-Times.com, a vBulletin forum for cat enthusiasts. You trust Google and Apple, but not Microsoft. two friends can SSO in, the other two of us can make internal accounts for the forum. Google friend owns androidfanbois.com, another vBulletin site. He allows Google's SSO. Three of us need accounts now.
So, we then do something like the US Federal Government having a standardized "internet identity", available to anyone who wants it. Well, we can forego corporate fanaticism this way, but now we've legislated digital identities and said goodbye to even the illusion of anonymity, and have a digital treasure trove of data for not only hackers and identity thieves (do you REALLY think the federal government is going to have bulletproof security on this thing?), but now you tell me that the NSA isn't tapping all of *that* "metadata", and I've got a password storage device for you. More to the point, if you google 'voyager529', you will indeed see my photo in the very first set of image results, and have a pretty good idea of who I am and what I do. I have a completely separate digital identity that is *not* tied to 'voyager529' in any sense.If the federal government gets in the online identity business, I sincerely doubt I'd get two.
We've eliminated corporate, and we've eliminated government, which leaves us with two obviously-even-worse options: self-signing and crowdsourcing. Self-signing gives us no real concept of who the person is, which is why Usenet devolved into the spam garden it is today. Requiring X number of people already joined to a website to validate that you are who you say you are turns logging into stuff into a popularity contest.
Passwords get stuck to monitors and under keyboards. Password managers are treasure troves to compromise and aren't cross compliant. Possession-based authentication (RFID card, NFC/Cell phone, etc.) makes losing your wallet ten times worse and you still need an issuing authority to oversee unique cards tied to a particular human. Biometrics are nice, but cross-device biometrics still have the problems of password managers, and having all ten fingers enrolled is a good idea, because one lapse in tomato slicing safety precautions and you won't be accessing your Gmail for a week.
No matter how we slice it, "proving that a person is the correct person on the internet" is a problem inherently