They're technically right, though. More so for the iPhone than for Android handsets, one is required to modify the baseband to a certain extent. Jailbreaking and SIM unlocking are both fairly benign in that they don't actually change the data being sent throught the modem, but the fact that Jailbreaking by its nature modifies the baseband makes it essentially a malware infection. It is CONTROLLED malware that does something in the users' favor, but there's no saying that it's impossible for malicious software to use a similar method to do something that IS harmful.
The flip sides to selectively granting permissions are the support headaches ("this app doesn't work! it doesn't tell me the restaurants near me!" "Did you allow it GPS access when you installed it?" "Of course not! It shouldn't need to know where I am!" "..."). More problematically, if you selectively disable network access to apps that need it to run ads (thus enabling them to be free), you've cut off its ad source, which leads to a whole OTHER set off issues, largely on the developer end.
It is not feasible to learn the CLI syntax for each of the hundreds of apps I deal with for clients.
This.
There's a tipping point with each operation. Making a new user and giving them a mailbox takes less than 30 seconds in Exchange 2007 when using the GUI, whereas typing in all the syntax for the same command can take closer to 90, and that's assuming that I don't have to dust off the fine manual to figure out which argument I forgot to add. If I had to add a hundred new users, however, it would certainly behoove me to write the script and just add names, rather than doing the GUI wizard for each user.
Command lines don't scale down well. GUI interfaces don't scale up well.
Knowing how to use both is just as important as knowing WHEN to use both.
but, but, but the web is the future for all applications! We'll all be running apps on the cloud from our thin clients! The network is the computer! etc etc!
Don't tell me they sold me a lie.
The most hilarious part of this post is the fact that it was posted by a slashdot user with a 4-digit UID and a username of "chrome".
A complete installation of Office 97 (yes, I just dusted off my copy of Office 97 Professional and took that screengrab) is a shade over 193MBytes, the Clipart collections appear to take up around 4MBytes, and this flavor doesn't include Frontpage. Office 2010 installs a trivial amount of Clipart itself; while Office '97 included the vector art packages on the disc, Office 2010 does it online - neither of which make a pit stop at the hard disk.
Honestly, with the exception of Outlook, I could probably do my day to day activities with the '97 versions of the rest of Office. Like you said yourself, OpenOffice is larger than Office 97 (and takes up plenty more RAM). People who have Office 97 still in use are probably in circumstances where they have either paid for (or not paid for) that version of Office, and on top of it, likely have hardware of a vintage that can't handle more recent office suites as gracefully.
No, it was still bloated. Remember, a kitchen sink install of 200MBytes was 10% of the 2GB hard disks that were par for the course in 1996. The difference is that 200MB is a fraction of a percent of a 320GB drive now, and also MS provided a very granular installer that made it possible to shave that number significantly down. By contrast, a barely-functional Office 2010 install is still over a gig.
While admittedly my post might have come across as such, I wasn't trying to say "shut up or leave". Believe it or not, I appreciate the fact that individuals like Moore can publish things like Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11. I believe in freedom of speech and press, and unlike many far-right conservatives (and far-left liberals, for that matter), that means that I wouldn't support anyone trying to take Moore's rights away from him simply because I disagree with the majority of what he says.
I'm not saying "shut up or leave", I'm saying, "If Canada has done so many more things right than we have, then what is the draw to staying here?" It was a sincere question. Perhaps Moore's very reason for staying is because he DOES desire to make some radical changes to our system and DOES want to correct some of the social and legislative injustices. If that's not his motivation for staying, then it appears to me, an individual who's never met the man in person, that it's foolish for him to stay in a country he's dissatisfied with and complain about it, instead of going someplace else that is better suited to the lifestyle he desires to lead.
Okay, first, the poster gets the main theme of the movie wrong. It is not about gun control. Moore realizes in the movie that guns are not the problem. We are not gun nuts. We are just nuts. Canada has no gun control, plenty of guns, and little gun violence. Moore points this out quite clearly.
I'll point back to my disclaimer about it having been several years since I saw the film. After reading your post, I recollect that (unsurprisingly) you are indeed accurate, and I was not.
As a bit of a side note, I find it interesting that the bits I've seen from Moore indicate that he seems to praise their healthcare system, relatively low firearm violence rates, and yet he hasn't emigrated there. I'd be interested to see his documentary on all that Canada does wrong to the point that he'd rather remain an American.
Next, the poster raises "good points?" Did you read them? He basically negates all his own points. I responded below, pointing out how silly his so called points are. I'm not repeating myself here for your benefit. Read below.
I missed where I negated myself.
>
Right, I agree that Moore writes movies that support his views. He writes movies to make a point. But, as in Bowling for Columbine, he will let facts change his mind. He set out to write a pro gun control movie, but when confronted with evidence that shows his premises are incorrect, he changes his mind, and lets us see the process.
If he's making a point in a documentary, then the end result will ultimately reflect whatever point he desires to make. This is the nature of filmmaking.
The thing is, movies that present both sides do not change people's minds. When you let people think for themselves, they will think what they have always thought. If you do try to change their minds, they will still think what they have always thought. Most people find changing their minds quite painful.
Of course. But as you stated before, Moore (supposedly) changed his mind throughout the course of his research. If his research was unbiased and it was genuinely the facts he came across that changed his mind, then to the average person, the facts should be sufficiently persuasive by themselves.
Finally, do you honestly suppose that there is such an animal as the bias free documentary, where both sides are presented fairly? If you believe that, I have a documentary film about the Brooklyn Bridge to sell you.
Maybe there isn't one where both sides are presented 100% fairly. I'll take a 60/40 mix, though, heck I'll even settle for a 70/30 from a documentarian (or whatever you call such a person) who at least demonstrates something of an effort to present the other side. Even if you want to argue that the facts changed his mind, answer me this: can you provide any citation that demonstrates that Moore even TRIED to set up an official interview with Dick Clark, and the ambush was his last resort after repeated attempts to get 20 minutes of the man's time? Even biased journalist/op-ed reporters like Maddow and Hannity do this. While I don't watch 60 minutes with any consistency, the clips I can recall involve shady storefront owners and other individuals under police investigation where they're avoiding things like implicating themselves in a crime or foul business practices. You may consider Clark to be in the same boat, but the tourist attraction was one of MANY properties he owns, and to my recollection wasn't under any state or federal investigation.
With regard to your other talking points...
Next, he says "Moore may have had a point about the ammo, but fails to mention K-Mart was in the process of maybe someday banning sales of ammo." Riiiiiight.
My only citation for this is the college professor who showed this film in our class; I'm unable to find an article on the topic that does not reflect the situation prior to the rel
Let me give a few examples from what's admittedly the only Moore documentary I've seen: Bowling for Columbine. I'll also add disclaimers regarding the fact that it's been nearly three years since I've seen the film, and that while I'm more left leaning than many of my evangelical-right friends and family, I do land comfortably to the right of about 99% of slashdot...
-In the film, Moore's most central theme is that "guns should be outlawed, or at the very least ludicrously regulated to the point of de facto outlaw". The individual he interviews that is against government weapons regulation is a borderline caricature, seemingly recruited straight from the looney bin to prove the point of "shifty eyes man shouldn't be allowed to possess the nuclear weapon he wants". If Moore was genuinely seeking to make a point well, he would have had a more normal person present their view with full knowledge that the truth would have won out. He did just that with the nice Canadian lady who refuses to lock her front door despite numerous break-ins.
-Moore may have had a point about ammo being readily available at K-Mart, but failed to include the fact that K-Mart had been in the process of evaluating the removal of gun ammo from its shelves long before he "brought the press". The movie was clearly slanted to make it look like it was his own doing.
-Moore tried to get an "interview" with Dick Clark...for sufficiently broad definitions of interview. Clark was clearly on his way somewhere, and Moore's 'guerrilla questioning' was asking all kinds of loaded and inflammatory questions - There's no way Clark could have come out of that looking good, whether it be through apology ("ZOMG he KNEW about all of this, and only NOW, after I ask the questions, is he making changes"), denial ("ZOMG he won't even admit there's a problem!"), or avoidance ("ZOMG he won't even discuss it with me!"). Moore himself wouldn't respond to such tactics much more gracefully than Clark did, if Sean Hannity knocked on his front door and asked him loaded questions while Moore is still in his bath robe.
-Moore villainizes Clark for the poor conditions the fudge serving lady works in. There were admittedly issues as Moore correctly points out, however he made it seem like the lady was a step away from slavery. Working at a fudge stand might not be the most glamorous work around, and it's not like the woman was able to save up for a Mercedes, but the job is hers, and it's a fairly secure one. Yes, it'd be nice if there were something closer to home for her, ideally one that paid better, but at the end of the day the alternative is most likely a position that doesn't pay as well and is likely even further away from her home. What was his solution? Have Dick Clark pay the service staff the same as the CEO's? Have Clark fold up shop so the woman's job disappears? Both? I'd be glad to be proven wrong by someone whose memory of the suggestion Moore made for the woman's financial situation is better than mine. Without a solution, the point rings hollow.
These are just a few examples of how Moore made his delivery to someone like myself, someone who leans somewhat-right-of-center, significantly more difficult to accept. The conclusion I came to was that if it takes shifty eyes guy and loaded surprise-interview questions to make his point, then his point must have issues of its own.
I'm not saying iPhones are without flaws, but to say that they're designed merely as "fashion accessories" is totally wrong.
Neither is he. What he's saying is that it's been Apple's general trend that, if function should come at the cost of form, that form tends to win.
Personally, I got a high-capacity battery for my Droid Incredible. I loved the form factor of the handset as it shipped out of the box. However, the phone ate through battery life at a nearly unusable pace. The new battery pack brings the battery life to where it needs to be (i.e. still having a usable charge when I get home at night), but the touch-only phone is nearly as thick as my HTC Rhodium, and that one has a slide-out keyboard. Form won out on the Incredible too.
It's the general trend that's a problem. Remember, there were plenty of people who carried around "Zac Morris" sized handsets in their day. Palm had a nice industry around PDAs, nearly all of which were larger than modern handsets and didn't include a cellular modem inside them. I'm def on board with the GP here; an extra 0.1 inches on a cell phone shouldn't be the huge deal it'd inevitably be made out to be, should it yield another 90 minutes of battery life.
Whether that message is "stop attacking Wikileaks, it's hurting 'America'" or "crack down on 'hackers'" is unpredictable.
This.
IMO, if Amazon sees a dent in their traffic, it's going to make just about anyone weary of being affiliated with them. The cables may not have been a compromise to national security, but it did make enough news to make them controversial, to say the least. At this point, any hosting provider, by the very nature of being asked to host their site, will be forced to make a political statement - either they piss off roughly half the population for hosting them, or the piss off the other half for not doing so. Amazon couldn't win, Quest can't win, and whoever else does hosting on that kind of scale will find themselves in a no-win situation. From there it becomes a business question: is it safer to appease the hackers, or is it safer to appease Uncle Sam? I may lean a bit closer to the support of wikileaks myself, but even if I were a hosting company, It'd be one hell of an undertaking to both host the site and not get caught in the crossfire.
...said by someone who hasn't dealt with more professional installations using genlocked component signals using switching gear that costs several thousand dollars a pop.
Conference rooms in offices are one thing. There are professional installations where the cost of replacing the gear is a few orders of magnitude more expensive than replacing a cable.
That said, this might raise the cost of marketing so I'm all for it even thought it means siding with Microsoft.
The problem with that line of logic is that marketing, like every other expense of a business, is baked into the product or service that we, the consumers, purchase. If marketing costs go up, depending on the company, it could either decrease the amount of advertising they do, or, more likely, increase the cost of the products we buy. I dunno about you, but I still buy stuff pretty frequently, and those products tend to advertise. Even if I buy a Pepsi on an impulse buy, or because I'm having a gathering, the cost of their Super Bowl commercials still factor in to the cost of the bottle. If advertising costs go up by 20%, you can bet that my Pepsi bottle will increase in cost by a similar amount.
It's frightening how close to reality the world of WALL-E is becoming.
some of the best code I've ever seen written is ESET's NOD32 v.2.7. 15MByte installer, 40MByte memory footprint, doesn't nag for anything, and runs on every version of Windows between 95 and 7 x64. Startup time increase is negligible compared to even MSE, scans are quick and accurate according to virtually every independent benchmark I've read. The 2.7 UI isn't pretty (3.0 and 4.0 versions are much nicer and still lean, though not as impressively so), but it gets the job done to the point where I *GLADLY* fork over $70 a year to keep my three computers virus free.
Paying for Norton, McAffee, TrendMicro, or Webroot is stupid. Paying for ESET is an investment. And no, I don't work for them or get any sort of compensation, just a fiercely loyal customer.
Private/invite only trackers, topsites, and software that allows cut/pasting keys from Google results into demo versions available on Softpedia/Tucows? yeah, you're pretty safe.
Public trackers, eDonkey/eMule, and the Gnutella network? Infected files are a dime a dozen.
Don't take your knowledge of the difference for granted.
Majed shipped several thousand prepaid wireless phones to co-conspirators in Michigan and Hong Kong.
Majed didn't go to jail for jailbreaking his iPhone, or even a handful of them for friends. The jailbreaking exemption (http://www.copyright.gov/1201/) states that the exemption exists for the owner of the device in order for the owner to use an alternate cellular network. This guy was essentially running a business buying heavily subsidized Tracfones, unlocking them, and selling them by the thousands. One could argue that between the purchase and the resale that he was the owner of the device and thus was covered, but let's keep perspective - Majed wasn't convicted for rooting his Droid, he was running a business on a technicality, and a stretched one at that.
never is their supercomputing power called upon in any episode.
Funny answer: How much computing power do YOU think would be necessary to run Windows 2370? And no, the year of Linux on the starship still hasn't happened yet - unless you'd like to attribute the exploding consoles to kernel panics instead of BSODs.
Serious answer: you have a hologram performing surgery. you have Harry Kim's Astrometrics lab which tracks some absurd amount of celestial objects, process regular space and subspace communications, and do database queries that would make Google's web index look like a shopping list. Certainly that's going to take a smidge more than a Pentium III. The way I always figured it was that the gel packs were responsible for the ship's day-to-day operations, otherwise they'd be camping out doing nothing for 90% of the time while still requiring power and maintenance.
I know you're using hyperbole to make a point, but here is the counter-argument...
Laptops (the most common analogy here) are more likely to be company issued in any company big enough to have enough sensitive data to merit the use of remote wipe features as more than a line item on a policy AND have road warriors requiring them over a deskop. 999 times out of 1,000 you're more likely to notice a missing laptop than a missing phone. I remember losing my Touch Pro2 at Six Flags. It's one of the heaviest phones released in the past few years and had a high capacity battery to boot, and it still took me 20 minutes to realize I'd lost it. It was a personal phone and had fallen to its doom off a roller coaster, but I had no means of knowing that for certain, and it was nearly 10 hours before the pieces of my phone were returned to me. Since phones are generally much more likely to be lost than laptops and they're always connected, it does make a bit more sense to have more cutthroat means of dealing with lost or stolen devices. A laptop carrying sensitive data should, in a perfect world, require a strong password at the BIOS level, plenty of restricting GPOs, and file system level encryption. Alternatively, it should require a strong passworded VPN connection so the data isn't actually stored on the laptop itself.
Also, i guarantee you that there's at least a handful of companies (i.e. your health insurance company, doctor's office, credit card companies, financial institution, former colleges) that consider YOUR data their data. If their phone was holding enough information to make you a victim of identity fraud to someone who stumbles upon a lost phone, you'd likely be grateful for such a policy. Even if someone wouldn't ordinarily do anything malicious with your data, the bar has been lowered from a crime of intent to a crime of opportunity. In the example listed above, I was grateful that my employer and I had worked out a deal where I got a separate hosted exchange account for personal use on the same server as my work account, and thus, he was able to remote wipe my personal phone. This made me feel better that an unscrupulous person wouldn't prank call or text my friends.
In their defense, neither my HTC Touch Pro2 running Windows Mobile, nor my Droid Incredible have fared much better in the battery life department when being used for navigation. When you're broadcasting to satellites several hundred miles away, the odds are that it'll take just a smidge more battery life than transmitting to a tower half a mile away or a headset three feet away.
If memory serves, the overwhelming majority of still-functioning brain cells have been with me from birth. Unfortunately, the exact wording that was in my 10th grade biology textbook wasn't stored on any neurons that fit the stated description.
My mechanic gets plenty of money from me not knowing the ins and outs of my exhaust manifold. However...
-I do know what oil my car takes and how to change it myself. I may not always change it myself due to time constraints.
-I know where my spare tire is located and how to change it if I'm stuck on the side of the road.
-I have a cursory idea as to what the major components of my car do, so when he describes what the issue is, my eyes don't glaze over.
-When I do get a 'check engine' light, I make a mental note of what was happening immediately before the light came on, if there is any change to the feel of driving, call my mechanic as immediately as possible to provide as complete a description as I'm able, and cancel any optional engagements until my car has been repaired.
As for why people have desktops when all they do is web browsing and word processing, the answer goes something like this: most people have at least one or two additional tasks that they do besides the core web/office jobs, except they completely forget about them when buying a computer. "Word and the Internet" was all anyone who walked into Staples ever did when I asked them, but as it turned out, these people also used Quicken, downloaded photos from their digital cameras, uploaded videos onto Youtube, and several other tasks that I had to remind them of. Plenty of them play Bejeweled or Diner Dash on Facebook. specialized, low-use computing environments have their place, but the iPad's success doesn't necessarily mean that it's the death of the desktop.
I don't think people are idiots for falling for a fake virus window that does look a lot like some commercial ones. I've seen a handful that were "norton yellow" and used similar fonts. I can't blame them for that - what I try to do is to have a screenshot of what their virus scanner's "infected" window looks like and put a copy of the image on their desktop. "If you're not sure, open this picture and compare them". This has helped many.
The people I *do* think are idiots are the ones who don't display even the slightest amount of common sense: "Chase sent me a text message asking me to call them about an issue with my account!" "do you have an account at Chase?" "...no." *facepalm*
Or its slightly-more-forgivable cousin: "Chase sent me a text message asking me to call them about an issue with my account!" "do you have an account at Chase?" "yes" "Okay, well, did your last bill indicate a problem?" "no." "Then may I suggest calling the customer service number on the back of your debit card and asking them if there's a problem?" "but the number is different than the one in the text message!!" "Exactly. If it's legit, the people you'll talk to when you call the number on your card will transfer you there. If it's a scam, they'll inform you as such." "I don't want to take the chance. should I text them back?" *facepalm*
I know I've said dumb things to my mechanic, but I trust him more than a poorly worded text message.
I agree, but to a certain point. First, I just joined Netflix a month ago, and out of seven movies I've looked up since then (I only look when I know I've got the time to watch it), only one of them has been available for live streaming. They've had the rest, but DVD shipment only. Presumably if they had the required clout to tell the MPAA where to shove their DRM, they'd have significantly more titles available for streaming.
By contrast, I remember reading an article saying that Netflix eclipsed bittorrent in the percentage of internet traffic. There's obviously demand, but the question is whether Netflix is monetizing that amount of traffic to make a significant enough dent in the MPAA ledgers to use it as leverage. If memory serves, iTunes was either #1 or #2 in music retailing before they had enough leverage with the MPAA to say "time for DRM to end up on the shelf next to the 8-track tape". I don't think Netflix is there yet, but give it a few years and the story may change. Like you said, the first sign of it will be 0-day releases. DRM will follow.
Slashdot Mirror
They're technically right, though. More so for the iPhone than for Android handsets, one is required to modify the baseband to a certain extent. Jailbreaking and SIM unlocking are both fairly benign in that they don't actually change the data being sent throught the modem, but the fact that Jailbreaking by its nature modifies the baseband makes it essentially a malware infection. It is CONTROLLED malware that does something in the users' favor, but there's no saying that it's impossible for malicious software to use a similar method to do something that IS harmful.
The flip sides to selectively granting permissions are the support headaches ("this app doesn't work! it doesn't tell me the restaurants near me!" "Did you allow it GPS access when you installed it?" "Of course not! It shouldn't need to know where I am!" "..."). More problematically, if you selectively disable network access to apps that need it to run ads (thus enabling them to be free), you've cut off its ad source, which leads to a whole OTHER set off issues, largely on the developer end.
It is not feasible to learn the CLI syntax for each of the hundreds of apps I deal with for clients.
This.
There's a tipping point with each operation. Making a new user and giving them a mailbox takes less than 30 seconds in Exchange 2007 when using the GUI, whereas typing in all the syntax for the same command can take closer to 90, and that's assuming that I don't have to dust off the fine manual to figure out which argument I forgot to add. If I had to add a hundred new users, however, it would certainly behoove me to write the script and just add names, rather than doing the GUI wizard for each user.
Command lines don't scale down well.
GUI interfaces don't scale up well.
Knowing how to use both is just as important as knowing WHEN to use both.
Joey
but, but, but the web is the future for all applications! We'll all be running apps on the cloud from our thin clients! The network is the computer! etc etc!
Don't tell me they sold me a lie.
The most hilarious part of this post is the fact that it was posted by a slashdot user with a 4-digit UID and a username of "chrome".
http://i51.tinypic.com/jkhkl0.png
A complete installation of Office 97 (yes, I just dusted off my copy of Office 97 Professional and took that screengrab) is a shade over 193MBytes, the Clipart collections appear to take up around 4MBytes, and this flavor doesn't include Frontpage. Office 2010 installs a trivial amount of Clipart itself; while Office '97 included the vector art packages on the disc, Office 2010 does it online - neither of which make a pit stop at the hard disk.
Honestly, with the exception of Outlook, I could probably do my day to day activities with the '97 versions of the rest of Office. Like you said yourself, OpenOffice is larger than Office 97 (and takes up plenty more RAM). People who have Office 97 still in use are probably in circumstances where they have either paid for (or not paid for) that version of Office, and on top of it, likely have hardware of a vintage that can't handle more recent office suites as gracefully.
And it was only slightly bloated.
No, it was still bloated. Remember, a kitchen sink install of 200MBytes was 10% of the 2GB hard disks that were par for the course in 1996. The difference is that 200MB is a fraction of a percent of a 320GB drive now, and also MS provided a very granular installer that made it possible to shave that number significantly down. By contrast, a barely-functional Office 2010 install is still over a gig.
While admittedly my post might have come across as such, I wasn't trying to say "shut up or leave". Believe it or not, I appreciate the fact that individuals like Moore can publish things like Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11. I believe in freedom of speech and press, and unlike many far-right conservatives (and far-left liberals, for that matter), that means that I wouldn't support anyone trying to take Moore's rights away from him simply because I disagree with the majority of what he says.
I'm not saying "shut up or leave", I'm saying, "If Canada has done so many more things right than we have, then what is the draw to staying here?" It was a sincere question. Perhaps Moore's very reason for staying is because he DOES desire to make some radical changes to our system and DOES want to correct some of the social and legislative injustices. If that's not his motivation for staying, then it appears to me, an individual who's never met the man in person, that it's foolish for him to stay in a country he's dissatisfied with and complain about it, instead of going someplace else that is better suited to the lifestyle he desires to lead.
That was my point.
Okay, first, the poster gets the main theme of the movie wrong. It is not about gun control. Moore realizes in the movie that guns are not the problem. We are not gun nuts. We are just nuts. Canada has no gun control, plenty of guns, and little gun violence. Moore points this out quite clearly.
I'll point back to my disclaimer about it having been several years since I saw the film. After reading your post, I recollect that (unsurprisingly) you are indeed accurate, and I was not.
As a bit of a side note, I find it interesting that the bits I've seen from Moore indicate that he seems to praise their healthcare system, relatively low firearm violence rates, and yet he hasn't emigrated there. I'd be interested to see his documentary on all that Canada does wrong to the point that he'd rather remain an American.
Next, the poster raises "good points?" Did you read them? He basically negates all his own points. I responded below, pointing out how silly his so called points are. I'm not repeating myself here for your benefit. Read below.
I missed where I negated myself.
>
Right, I agree that Moore writes movies that support his views. He writes movies to make a point. But, as in Bowling for Columbine, he will let facts change his mind. He set out to write a pro gun control movie, but when confronted with evidence that shows his premises are incorrect, he changes his mind, and lets us see the process.
If he's making a point in a documentary, then the end result will ultimately reflect whatever point he desires to make. This is the nature of filmmaking.
The thing is, movies that present both sides do not change people's minds. When you let people think for themselves, they will think what they have always thought. If you do try to change their minds, they will still think what they have always thought. Most people find changing their minds quite painful.
Of course. But as you stated before, Moore (supposedly) changed his mind throughout the course of his research. If his research was unbiased and it was genuinely the facts he came across that changed his mind, then to the average person, the facts should be sufficiently persuasive by themselves.
Finally, do you honestly suppose that there is such an animal as the bias free documentary, where both sides are presented fairly? If you believe that, I have a documentary film about the Brooklyn Bridge to sell you.
Maybe there isn't one where both sides are presented 100% fairly. I'll take a 60/40 mix, though, heck I'll even settle for a 70/30 from a documentarian (or whatever you call such a person) who at least demonstrates something of an effort to present the other side. Even if you want to argue that the facts changed his mind, answer me this: can you provide any citation that demonstrates that Moore even TRIED to set up an official interview with Dick Clark, and the ambush was his last resort after repeated attempts to get 20 minutes of the man's time? Even biased journalist/op-ed reporters like Maddow and Hannity do this. While I don't watch 60 minutes with any consistency, the clips I can recall involve shady storefront owners and other individuals under police investigation where they're avoiding things like implicating themselves in a crime or foul business practices. You may consider Clark to be in the same boat, but the tourist attraction was one of MANY properties he owns, and to my recollection wasn't under any state or federal investigation.
With regard to your other talking points...
Next, he says "Moore may have had a point about the ammo, but fails to mention K-Mart was in the process of maybe someday banning sales of ammo." Riiiiiight.
My only citation for this is the college professor who showed this film in our class; I'm unable to find an article on the topic that does not reflect the situation prior to the rel
Let me give a few examples from what's admittedly the only Moore documentary I've seen: Bowling for Columbine. I'll also add disclaimers regarding the fact that it's been nearly three years since I've seen the film, and that while I'm more left leaning than many of my evangelical-right friends and family, I do land comfortably to the right of about 99% of slashdot...
-In the film, Moore's most central theme is that "guns should be outlawed, or at the very least ludicrously regulated to the point of de facto outlaw". The individual he interviews that is against government weapons regulation is a borderline caricature, seemingly recruited straight from the looney bin to prove the point of "shifty eyes man shouldn't be allowed to possess the nuclear weapon he wants". If Moore was genuinely seeking to make a point well, he would have had a more normal person present their view with full knowledge that the truth would have won out. He did just that with the nice Canadian lady who refuses to lock her front door despite numerous break-ins.
-Moore may have had a point about ammo being readily available at K-Mart, but failed to include the fact that K-Mart had been in the process of evaluating the removal of gun ammo from its shelves long before he "brought the press". The movie was clearly slanted to make it look like it was his own doing.
-Moore tried to get an "interview" with Dick Clark...for sufficiently broad definitions of interview. Clark was clearly on his way somewhere, and Moore's 'guerrilla questioning' was asking all kinds of loaded and inflammatory questions - There's no way Clark could have come out of that looking good, whether it be through apology ("ZOMG he KNEW about all of this, and only NOW, after I ask the questions, is he making changes"), denial ("ZOMG he won't even admit there's a problem!"), or avoidance ("ZOMG he won't even discuss it with me!"). Moore himself wouldn't respond to such tactics much more gracefully than Clark did, if Sean Hannity knocked on his front door and asked him loaded questions while Moore is still in his bath robe.
-Moore villainizes Clark for the poor conditions the fudge serving lady works in. There were admittedly issues as Moore correctly points out, however he made it seem like the lady was a step away from slavery. Working at a fudge stand might not be the most glamorous work around, and it's not like the woman was able to save up for a Mercedes, but the job is hers, and it's a fairly secure one. Yes, it'd be nice if there were something closer to home for her, ideally one that paid better, but at the end of the day the alternative is most likely a position that doesn't pay as well and is likely even further away from her home. What was his solution? Have Dick Clark pay the service staff the same as the CEO's? Have Clark fold up shop so the woman's job disappears? Both? I'd be glad to be proven wrong by someone whose memory of the suggestion Moore made for the woman's financial situation is better than mine. Without a solution, the point rings hollow.
These are just a few examples of how Moore made his delivery to someone like myself, someone who leans somewhat-right-of-center, significantly more difficult to accept. The conclusion I came to was that if it takes shifty eyes guy and loaded surprise-interview questions to make his point, then his point must have issues of its own.
The frequency is 401MHz.
I'm not saying iPhones are without flaws, but to say that they're designed merely as "fashion accessories" is totally wrong.
Neither is he. What he's saying is that it's been Apple's general trend that, if function should come at the cost of form, that form tends to win.
Personally, I got a high-capacity battery for my Droid Incredible. I loved the form factor of the handset as it shipped out of the box. However, the phone ate through battery life at a nearly unusable pace. The new battery pack brings the battery life to where it needs to be (i.e. still having a usable charge when I get home at night), but the touch-only phone is nearly as thick as my HTC Rhodium, and that one has a slide-out keyboard. Form won out on the Incredible too.
It's the general trend that's a problem. Remember, there were plenty of people who carried around "Zac Morris" sized handsets in their day. Palm had a nice industry around PDAs, nearly all of which were larger than modern handsets and didn't include a cellular modem inside them. I'm def on board with the GP here; an extra 0.1 inches on a cell phone shouldn't be the huge deal it'd inevitably be made out to be, should it yield another 90 minutes of battery life.
The carnage eventually left 256 power plants offline, causing cellular communication and media distribution.
how, might I ask, would power plants being offline CAUSE media distribution?
If the RIAA gets word of this, it's a safe bet that my municipal power plant will be the next lawsuit target.
Whether that message is "stop attacking Wikileaks, it's hurting 'America'" or "crack down on 'hackers'" is unpredictable.
This.
IMO, if Amazon sees a dent in their traffic, it's going to make just about anyone weary of being affiliated with them. The cables may not have been a compromise to national security, but it did make enough news to make them controversial, to say the least. At this point, any hosting provider, by the very nature of being asked to host their site, will be forced to make a political statement - either they piss off roughly half the population for hosting them, or the piss off the other half for not doing so. Amazon couldn't win, Quest can't win, and whoever else does hosting on that kind of scale will find themselves in a no-win situation. From there it becomes a business question: is it safer to appease the hackers, or is it safer to appease Uncle Sam? I may lean a bit closer to the support of wikileaks myself, but even if I were a hosting company, It'd be one hell of an undertaking to both host the site and not get caught in the crossfire.
...said by someone who hasn't dealt with more professional installations using genlocked component signals using switching gear that costs several thousand dollars a pop.
Conference rooms in offices are one thing. There are professional installations where the cost of replacing the gear is a few orders of magnitude more expensive than replacing a cable.
That said, this might raise the cost of marketing so I'm all for it even thought it means siding with Microsoft.
The problem with that line of logic is that marketing, like every other expense of a business, is baked into the product or service that we, the consumers, purchase. If marketing costs go up, depending on the company, it could either decrease the amount of advertising they do, or, more likely, increase the cost of the products we buy. I dunno about you, but I still buy stuff pretty frequently, and those products tend to advertise. Even if I buy a Pepsi on an impulse buy, or because I'm having a gathering, the cost of their Super Bowl commercials still factor in to the cost of the bottle. If advertising costs go up by 20%, you can bet that my Pepsi bottle will increase in cost by a similar amount.
It's frightening how close to reality the world of WALL-E is becoming.
some of the best code I've ever seen written is ESET's NOD32 v.2.7. 15MByte installer, 40MByte memory footprint, doesn't nag for anything, and runs on every version of Windows between 95 and 7 x64. Startup time increase is negligible compared to even MSE, scans are quick and accurate according to virtually every independent benchmark I've read. The 2.7 UI isn't pretty (3.0 and 4.0 versions are much nicer and still lean, though not as impressively so), but it gets the job done to the point where I *GLADLY* fork over $70 a year to keep my three computers virus free.
Paying for Norton, McAffee, TrendMicro, or Webroot is stupid. Paying for ESET is an investment. And no, I don't work for them or get any sort of compensation, just a fiercely loyal customer.
Depends on the source.
Private/invite only trackers, topsites, and software that allows cut/pasting keys from Google results into demo versions available on Softpedia/Tucows? yeah, you're pretty safe.
Public trackers, eDonkey/eMule, and the Gnutella network? Infected files are a dime a dozen.
Don't take your knowledge of the difference for granted.
From the link in TFA:
Majed shipped several thousand prepaid wireless phones to co-conspirators in Michigan and Hong Kong.
Majed didn't go to jail for jailbreaking his iPhone, or even a handful of them for friends. The jailbreaking exemption (http://www.copyright.gov/1201/) states that the exemption exists for the owner of the device in order for the owner to use an alternate cellular network. This guy was essentially running a business buying heavily subsidized Tracfones, unlocking them, and selling them by the thousands. One could argue that between the purchase and the resale that he was the owner of the device and thus was covered, but let's keep perspective - Majed wasn't convicted for rooting his Droid, he was running a business on a technicality, and a stretched one at that.
Like this Asian attorney: http://failblog.org/2009/09/09/lawyer-name-win/
never is their supercomputing power called upon in any episode.
Funny answer: How much computing power do YOU think would be necessary to run Windows 2370? And no, the year of Linux on the starship still hasn't happened yet - unless you'd like to attribute the exploding consoles to kernel panics instead of BSODs.
Serious answer: you have a hologram performing surgery. you have Harry Kim's Astrometrics lab which tracks some absurd amount of celestial objects, process regular space and subspace communications, and do database queries that would make Google's web index look like a shopping list. Certainly that's going to take a smidge more than a Pentium III. The way I always figured it was that the gel packs were responsible for the ship's day-to-day operations, otherwise they'd be camping out doing nothing for 90% of the time while still requiring power and maintenance.
I know you're using hyperbole to make a point, but here is the counter-argument...
Laptops (the most common analogy here) are more likely to be company issued in any company big enough to have enough sensitive data to merit the use of remote wipe features as more than a line item on a policy AND have road warriors requiring them over a deskop. 999 times out of 1,000 you're more likely to notice a missing laptop than a missing phone. I remember losing my Touch Pro2 at Six Flags. It's one of the heaviest phones released in the past few years and had a high capacity battery to boot, and it still took me 20 minutes to realize I'd lost it. It was a personal phone and had fallen to its doom off a roller coaster, but I had no means of knowing that for certain, and it was nearly 10 hours before the pieces of my phone were returned to me. Since phones are generally much more likely to be lost than laptops and they're always connected, it does make a bit more sense to have more cutthroat means of dealing with lost or stolen devices. A laptop carrying sensitive data should, in a perfect world, require a strong password at the BIOS level, plenty of restricting GPOs, and file system level encryption. Alternatively, it should require a strong passworded VPN connection so the data isn't actually stored on the laptop itself.
Also, i guarantee you that there's at least a handful of companies (i.e. your health insurance company, doctor's office, credit card companies, financial institution, former colleges) that consider YOUR data their data. If their phone was holding enough information to make you a victim of identity fraud to someone who stumbles upon a lost phone, you'd likely be grateful for such a policy. Even if someone wouldn't ordinarily do anything malicious with your data, the bar has been lowered from a crime of intent to a crime of opportunity. In the example listed above, I was grateful that my employer and I had worked out a deal where I got a separate hosted exchange account for personal use on the same server as my work account, and thus, he was able to remote wipe my personal phone. This made me feel better that an unscrupulous person wouldn't prank call or text my friends.
In their defense, neither my HTC Touch Pro2 running Windows Mobile, nor my Droid Incredible have fared much better in the battery life department when being used for navigation. When you're broadcasting to satellites several hundred miles away, the odds are that it'll take just a smidge more battery life than transmitting to a tower half a mile away or a headset three feet away.
If memory serves, the overwhelming majority of still-functioning brain cells have been with me from birth. Unfortunately, the exact wording that was in my 10th grade biology textbook wasn't stored on any neurons that fit the stated description.
My mechanic gets plenty of money from me not knowing the ins and outs of my exhaust manifold. However...
-I do know what oil my car takes and how to change it myself. I may not always change it myself due to time constraints.
-I know where my spare tire is located and how to change it if I'm stuck on the side of the road.
-I have a cursory idea as to what the major components of my car do, so when he describes what the issue is, my eyes don't glaze over.
-When I do get a 'check engine' light, I make a mental note of what was happening immediately before the light came on, if there is any change to the feel of driving, call my mechanic as immediately as possible to provide as complete a description as I'm able, and cancel any optional engagements until my car has been repaired.
As for why people have desktops when all they do is web browsing and word processing, the answer goes something like this: most people have at least one or two additional tasks that they do besides the core web/office jobs, except they completely forget about them when buying a computer. "Word and the Internet" was all anyone who walked into Staples ever did when I asked them, but as it turned out, these people also used Quicken, downloaded photos from their digital cameras, uploaded videos onto Youtube, and several other tasks that I had to remind them of. Plenty of them play Bejeweled or Diner Dash on Facebook. specialized, low-use computing environments have their place, but the iPad's success doesn't necessarily mean that it's the death of the desktop.
I don't think people are idiots for falling for a fake virus window that does look a lot like some commercial ones. I've seen a handful that were "norton yellow" and used similar fonts. I can't blame them for that - what I try to do is to have a screenshot of what their virus scanner's "infected" window looks like and put a copy of the image on their desktop. "If you're not sure, open this picture and compare them". This has helped many.
The people I *do* think are idiots are the ones who don't display even the slightest amount of common sense:
"Chase sent me a text message asking me to call them about an issue with my account!"
"do you have an account at Chase?"
"...no."
*facepalm*
Or its slightly-more-forgivable cousin:
"Chase sent me a text message asking me to call them about an issue with my account!"
"do you have an account at Chase?"
"yes"
"Okay, well, did your last bill indicate a problem?"
"no."
"Then may I suggest calling the customer service number on the back of your debit card and asking them if there's a problem?"
"but the number is different than the one in the text message!!"
"Exactly. If it's legit, the people you'll talk to when you call the number on your card will transfer you there. If it's a scam, they'll inform you as such."
"I don't want to take the chance. should I text them back?"
*facepalm*
I know I've said dumb things to my mechanic, but I trust him more than a poorly worded text message.
I agree, but to a certain point. First, I just joined Netflix a month ago, and out of seven movies I've looked up since then (I only look when I know I've got the time to watch it), only one of them has been available for live streaming. They've had the rest, but DVD shipment only. Presumably if they had the required clout to tell the MPAA where to shove their DRM, they'd have significantly more titles available for streaming.
By contrast, I remember reading an article saying that Netflix eclipsed bittorrent in the percentage of internet traffic. There's obviously demand, but the question is whether Netflix is monetizing that amount of traffic to make a significant enough dent in the MPAA ledgers to use it as leverage. If memory serves, iTunes was either #1 or #2 in music retailing before they had enough leverage with the MPAA to say "time for DRM to end up on the shelf next to the 8-track tape". I don't think Netflix is there yet, but give it a few years and the story may change. Like you said, the first sign of it will be 0-day releases. DRM will follow.