I guess "Asteroid Misses Earth, Just Like It's Done Every 4 Years For Millennia" just wasn't catchy enough.
What I find interesting is the helpful picture of what an asteroid "50-165 feet across" might look like hitting the Earth. Boy, the size of a foot sure has changed since I last checked...
Depends on how common they are, and where. If it's somewhere near Mexican border, it's not exactly surprising.
Funny, you didn't mention that as a condition when you said that doesn't ever happen here. Now it's been revised to well it doesn't happen that much. And if I posted pics showing cops on every street corner frisking citizens, goose stepping down the streets, you'd still say "Well at least their uniforms look more professional." Please man, go home. You fail at life.
. I was talking about rows and rows of buildings that have broken windows and, in parts, walls - but which people live in nevertheless, because they don't have any better place to live. With large families with lots of kids.
We call that "the south" here.
So I don't really see the point of arguing further. If Egypt is so much better, why don't you just move there?
Reducto ad absurdum... if you can't beat 'em, hand wave 'em! Perhaps you forgot my original point: Which is that we shouldn't be so high and mighty about the civil rights infractions of other countries when our record isn't exactly full of sunshine and kittens either. A point you steadfastly refuse to acknowledge, despite the overwhelming evidence against you. I bet if I argued right now the air in Egypt was slightly more oxygenated than here, you'd start wailing about how that might be true but the oxygen in our air is better oxygen. Quality over quantity, am I right?
Also, it's one thing when there's a large concentration of police force during protests or other big event. Completely another when it is a day-to-day, routine thing.
...because the city blocks surrounding it would be most accurately described as something you'd expect to see in the aftermath of a bombing run on the city.
so know illegal aliens getting arrested for blocking traffic is the same as jailing someone for posting something some peoples club considers offensive?
*winces at the bad english* Freedom of expression must have a very different definition in your world.
your violent crime examples of homicides, not violent crime. Of course, rape and violence on women is rarely reported, and even less frequently documented. so you link is less facts and more half truth.
Yeah, what was I thinking, using the most reported and documented violent crime as a baseline reference? Silly me.
The crime rate was low in Germany During the Nazi regime. Is that really an argument that Nazi Germans is better then the US, or any country?
You Godwin'd yourself. But ignoring that, there's about 11 million dead Jews and political prisoners that would disagree about the crime rate. But you know, other than that, there's also the problem of there not being any statistics on the crime rate or population of the Third Reich for the past 67 years.
That said, I suspect that there rate of imprisonment is lower then the US. The USs prison increase is doe toy the privatization of prisons.
Every time you post something to the internet, God kills a dictionary. The ownership of our prisons has as much relationship to the reasons why so many are jailed each year as your literary shortcomings do to the number of books Amazon sells each year.
the truth is, they aren't better. All your metrics ignore what life is like for over half their population.
I will admit I have more confidence that the CIA, the United Nations, The Harvard Institute of Law, and a handful of major news outlets got the numbers right than I do in a person on the internet literary abilities of a fifth grader, who is backing up his argument with no citations, logical reasoning, or even an anecdotal story.
However our country can, and has many times, changed without needing a revolution.
I'm skeptical of this claim that stuff has happened many times. I don't think stuff happens many times. In fact, I'd even go as far as to call myself a stuff skeptic. I'm going to need a citation from you that the country has done stuff, and that this stuff has happened many times. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof, you know.
We do live in a country where you can have a different house of worship on each corner at an intersect and nothing violent happens.
...it can cover multiple orbital trajectories while imperialist pig Yankee capitalist satellites are only capable of a single orbit.
Our spy satellites can cover multiple orbital trajectories too, and without exploding a few weeks after launch or burning up in the atmosphere. Oh, and you might want to get that mole on your back looked at; Our intelligence analysts think it might be cancerous. Or not. We're just saying, after spending so much money on surveillance watching your every move, it'd be a shame to waste the investment. By the way, kudos on your launch. No really, we mean that -- we're really impressed you can do that when most of your country doesn't even have electricity or basic cable for your citizens to watch.
2 - If anybody actually thought that the eqyptian government was going to be all good now because of the uprising clearly has not been paying attention. Id love to visit but not until there is another revolution there.
There's a few things about Egypt you should probably know. For one thing, the poverty rate there isn't much worse there than the United States (15% versus 20%) despite the radically different size of the economy and median income ($6k versus $40k). And before you jump down my throat on "proving that", I sourced that information from the CIA World Factbook. They have a significantly lower violent crime rate than here as well -- almost four times less (and yes, I can back that up too from a reliable source, The UN Office on Drugs and Crime. And when it comes to jailing people, the United States ranks #1. Egypt? #165. (Oh yes, sourced that too).
So when you get all uppity about how they're jailing a blogger for three years for publishing something anti-muslim, I want you to remember the terror watch lists. I want you to remember Guantanamo Bay. I want you to think of the hundreds of political prisoners (Citation? Got you covered. I assume Harvard Law School is prestigious enough?) we ignore. You talk about media control and manipulation in other countries like Egypt like they're somehow worse than those of the west.
The truth is... they're better. Three years for pissing off the government here is a comparatively light sentence: We put people in jail for at least a year for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Don't ask for a revolution before considering visiting Egypt. Chances are good, your country needs one more.
We need to start looking at them as performance art.
Historically, there's been nothing artistic about the performance of Internet Explorer, except perhaps in the wide and varied ways in which it catches fire. That said... someone really needed to have screwed the pooch to make this vulnerability possible; Windows by default won't dump mouse movement events into a window or control's message queue unless it's directly over it, and the x,y coordinates are usually relative not absolute (though one can make a dll call to get the absolute coordinates). But then, IE happily chirps your display devices' absolute size in HTTP requests, and its bag on the side ".hta" files and associated total bypass of normal security in order to turn internet explorer into some kind of interpreter for standalone applications may have something to due with this monumental screwup.
And make no mistake: They had to screw up pretty good to make this one possible. Normal windows applications just don't work like this.
"[...]All the necessary pieces already exist, they just haven't been combined yet.'"
Not me. I'm behind ten proxies and use Tor for everything. I use throwaway e-mail addresses from places like Mailinator. I even registered my gmail account using a hospital courtesy phone... that was in another country. My friends joke that I'm paranoid of the government. No, I could care less about the government... it's all the corporations!
Um, then you should receive a 3D gun, the packaging for a credit card skimmer, or a timing circuit. Haven't we gotten past this "make the tools illegal" crap yet? It's what you do with them, not the item itself that's problematic, and there are valid uses for all the above.
I've tried telling my government that... but they keep arresting, torturing, threatening, and imprisoning me whenever I do. I'm also on a whole bunch of watch lists, kill lists, security lists, lists of lists, databases of lists, lists of databases... I don't even know anymore whether I'm coded green, yellow, orange, additional screening, deportation... it seems like they come up with new ways to criminalize things every day. I don't know a single person who isn't a felon anymore... the only difference is, not all of them have been caught or pissed in the cheerios of someone "important".
Okay, what if I submit a design to print a 3D gun (or replacement parts for one)? What about the packaging for, say, a credit card skimmer? How about a timing circuit made entirely out of electrically-conductive plastic (so it doesn't show up on an x-ray scanner)? I can only hope they look at the things being submitted; But I'm reminded of the scene in Batman begins where Alfred says, "Well, we'll have to order a lot of them in order to avoid suspicion." "Oh? How many?" "About ten thousand sir." "Well, at least we'll have spares."
3D printers open up a whole new world for both good and bad applications. If they aren't thinking about this now, they should start -- because someone else is reading this right now and tapping their fingers together saying "myes, myes my pretties..."
And for the record, I'd gladly pay a small stipend every month to skip the rigamarole of setting up filters, searches, rss feeds, and the sorting and what-not (it takes about 5, sometimes 10 minutes every few days) and wasting so much bandwidth if there was a legitimate service that met my needs. And it's not a high bar to clear; Be commercial free. Be high quality (I can wait hours or days -- just make it good, not Netflix instashit). Be complete. And be timely. So far, not a single commercial offering has managed to even hit two out of four. They're all have licensing problems and such with the studios -- Netflix can't show you something until it's been out for a month, but Redbox can. Timely? No. High quality? Everything that's out there is streaming -- and it's all universally shit. I'm patient; but I guess there's no market for people like me who actually enjoy high quality video and audio and not mrrrfffwhaaarrggrrrble audio and blotchy artifact-covered action sequences. And none of the offerings are even complete! Licensing fucks every last offering there is -- nobody has everything I want to watch. Nobody is even close... and Netflix' streaming service' collection really only contains the popular shows. Try finding, say, classic Dr. Who. Nope -- fuck you, they say, it's not worth our time and effort.
Piracy delivers what no commercial offering can. I say this honestly: I'd pay real money if they could just get their collective heads out of their asses and play nice with each other. Piracy doesn't exist because people like to "steal", it exists because these dumb bastards are dinosaurs engaged in endless mating rituals with much ripping of grass and beating of chest, and fuck the customer man, what do they know about the market, am I right? x_x Well, speaking as a customer, I know only one thing: You don't have what I want. Goodbye.
Sure, the mean contains some information. But the standard deviation contains just as much, if not more! Very seldom do I see anything from which sigma could be inferred, yet whenever you collect data for averages, you can easily calc sigma.
I can understand and appreciate your frustration; I share it. But let's be honest: The average person doesn't understand sigma, standard deviation, margin of error, or any of those other statistical concepts. They do like "Top 10" lists though and rankings. And for these things, averages are usually the best metric, even if they don't tell the whole story, or even a particularly accurate one.
The other thing is, most of the ISPs on that list are using some variety of traffic shaping. Internet users don't care whether their download takes 5 minutes or 5 minutes and 30 seconds... but they're going to throw a hissy fit if their video starts in 10 seconds instead of 4, even if the remaining duration plays without a problem. Needless to say, ISPs aren't blind to this -- they prioritize traffic to sites like Netflix. Or, in the case of mobile providers... they throw it under the bus. But network neutrality doesn't exist in the United States or the UK, which is where Netflix operates... so even a detailed statistical analysis wouldn't be terribly useful.
We can't expect the average person, with the attention spa--oh look a kitty!... to be bothered to see the deeper truth that a full statistical exploration would reveal. Bluntly, they're too stupid to either know, or care.
Something tells me you'll never have enough time to watch/listen/play all that content, particularly if you've acquired nearly a terabyte within 6 months
Mmmm, average 1080p HQ bluray rip: 10GB. 40 minutes of a 720p HQ TV episode: about 1.25GB. 75% of my video watching time goes to TV episodes like The Daily Show, Mythbusters, etc. The other 25% goes to movies. So the total for the 900 TB of data I pulled last month equates to about 19.8 hours a day of high quality video (the only kind I download). That said, the problem is a lot of it is automated by feeds and searches. About 10--15% of the TV episodes are later repacked as "proper" tagged, meaning that there may have been a few seconds of commercial added, or a sync or clipping issue, etc. Many of the TV episodes pulled are dups; I pick the highest quality one out of each batch. When you take it all into consideration, about 2/3rds of what I download for TV episodes is later deleted or remuxed. Movies do not have these same problems -- only about 15% of movies are discarded. So while yes, it does seem like a lot, due to the quality control problems, I'm really only getting around 5.5--6 hours of archivable video. And out of that, I probably throw another third of it away because I am doing the pirate equivalent of channel surfing -- seeing what else is out there, but usually finding it lacking. So in the end, I'm really only watching 2--3 hours of video a day. For comparison, the average person watches about 5 hours of TV a day. Average. But about a third of what they watch (if not more) is commercials. When you take that into account... my viewing habits are actually average. I just skip all the commercials, non-skippable content, etc. I watch just what I want, the way I want, where and when I want.
That's why I'm a pirate. Simply put, it's just a better use of my time than wading through the crap-flood everyone else does; I get an extra 2.5 hours every day to spend not being a mindless consumer-droid. That's 2.5 hours I can put towards excercising, or cooking something other than TV dinners. That's time I can spend with my family playing games, or working on coding projects, or reading. Being a pirate means I get 10.4% more time in a day than someone who isn't.
Comparing the current state of the art and complaining that what we fielded 30 years ago was a waste is not valid.
Perhaps, but NASA has had major managment issues from the start. Go read Appendix D of the Challenger Disaster report, by one Mr. Feynman, who had to fight tooth and nail to expose the institutional problems that led to the problem. It's since become a case study in how not to manage a project and is required reading in several prominent engineering companies. The design of the shuttle engines, while amazing pieces of technology, were not built according to best practices -- it was literally put together as a whole system and then tested as a completed unit rather than integrating each subsystem after extensive testing and comparison with expected baseline. Debugging the damn thing was exceptionally problematic and to this day it's still not known if all the possible failure modes and bugs have been found and documented. Management showed a long pattern of decreasing safety standards and bypassing procedural safeguards to maintain their image as "cutting edge".
NASA still suffers from those problems today, and private contractors and now the USAF have proven that the technology is actually not all that sophisticated nor requiring the massive administrative overhead that is so typical of NASA missions and daily operations. They've done it faster, better, and cheaper than NASA did, and their success lies not in copying existing technology, or inventing new technology, but in having good project management skills and not letting committee thinking and politics mangle and derail the whole thing, leading to massive cost overruns.
Bruce Schneider just facepalmed. How many times do you people need to be told client side security doesn't work? Of course the Windows 8 store got hacked: No matter how much you try to lock it down, all you're doing is just giving some bored teenagers and underemployed/unemployed programmers something to challenge them. The Playstation 3 had some very advanced client-side security. It still got broken. It took them awhile, but it fell, as all client side security must. If you have physical access to the hardware, you own it. It may take a mod chip, it may take a special program, or technical knowledge, but the problem is one that although the skillset required to hack it may be highly specialized, once that single success happens, everybody reaps the benefits within hours to months. And there are far more bored engineers than there are DRM proponents. All client-side DRM has ever accomplished is frustrating and annoying paying customers.
This isn't news. This isn't even interesting. Hell, let's be honest here -- how many of you work at a company that has plans to migrate to Windows 8? Support it for people who have it at home? How many of you are planning on making it your primary operating system?
I see very few hands. This operating system exploded on the launch pad. It's an attempt to emulate Apple, and they botched it so hard that senior Microsoft executives will be getting handed pink slips by the end of next year -- I'd wager serious money on that. Microsoft lost its ability to innovate awhile ago... now it just follows where the market goes, maintaining a profit margin but never pushing the margins of the technology. The reasons for this are many and beyond the scope of this post...
But don't act surprised when someone cracks a client-side security scheme. No implimentation of it has denied a determined attacker with the resources of a private individual or (at worst) a small company to date. It has a fundamental design flaw that cannot be corrected.
Education is still very affordable in most fields for anyone who bothers to take the time to plan it out before committing.
My bullshit-o-meter just broke on that. Seriously, you killed it. Let's roll some numbers, mkays?
1 bedroom apartment in my area: $650 ($7,800/yr)
Avg. groceries/person/month: $240 ($2,880/yr)
Electric: $30 ($360/yr)
Phone: $50 ($600/yr)
Transportation: $120 ($1,440/yr)
Tuition: $5,500/yr
Now tuition doesn't cover the cost of books (That'll be another $600), or supplies ($250), or any incidentals you may need like a computer, car, furniture, etc. But we'll ignore those incidentals -- you're still looking at about $20 grand a year. Most of these things you aren't going to have at 18 unless your parents were affluent and gave them to you. Which means... you're gonna have to buy them to live on your own. Even with a roomate. Or several. Oh wait... you have no employable skills -- that's what you're going to college for!. Say hello to minimum wage at $9.50 an hour. And from 18-25, the student loans you can take out are capped, and although most parents do not contribute to their child's education, outdated calcuations based on your parents' income still determine eligibility for a wide variety of assistance programs. Your first year of college will be capped at $5,500 in loans. That's only a mere $14,500 short of what you need to survive your first year. But hey, let's say you take that summer job and you work a full 40 hours a week for three months straight (ahahahaa! Crazy, I know, but Republicans believe it's possible, so let's play along)... Congratulations! Your full time job has earned you... $4,936 gross. Oh wait... forgot taxes. That'll be $4,066.. net.
OH NOES! You're still short $10,434. So about that "very affordable" and how you were "not even exceptional effort" bit? How about a nice resounding Fuck you from the Department Of People Who Can Do Basic Math. There's a reason there's a trillion plus dollar student loan crisis out there, and an entire generation going bankrupt. You don't get to just handwave and say "Well, I was smart. Everyone else was just stupid." It doesn't work that way. You got lucky. Most people didn't. Statistical. Factual. Truth.
It actually makes me want to torrent it, even though I don't torrent movies, or have any interest in watching it.
Maybe that's the point. It's such a shitty movie the only way to get publicity for it is to say "We're suing the pants off people for this!" It makes it sound like it's valuable. Like they're wasting millions of dollars and throwing armies of lawyers at it because it's worth defending. The reality is... it's a shitty movie and there's way too much marketing research saying that people who pirate are also their most reliable customers. If you wanted to get your sales numbers up... what better way than to get your most reliable customers to say "Hey, I see smoke over there. Must be a fire, let's go check it out!"
Never believe the reason 'they' state (the generic ominous 'they', which applies to any group with an agenda); You look at the effect. That's almost always the reason for the action taken. The few times it isn't, they stop right away and spin the hell out of it... which us laypeople refer to as a Fuck Up.
will Canadian courts be amicable to these tactics after changes to copyright law were made specifically to prevent the predatory legal entanglement of Canadian citizens? Will the studio actually attempt to pursue the situation beyond the proliferation of threatening extortion letters? How would the already-clogged courts react to what amounts to denial-of-service attack on the judicial system?"
The better question is: What incentive is there for the industry to stop? The United States has proved militarily, economically, and in many other ways that shock and awe are a powerful combination to ensure compliance. Not that they're the first -- the Romans did the same thing, as did many cultures before them as well. The fact is, the only thing they're losing is a tiny amount of money and they're getting huge amounts of press out of it.
Has it ever occurred to anyone that the laws and lawyers and letters and posturing isn't meant to actually have an impact? Statistically, it can't. If right now, today, everyone who was sharing files just for today was dragged into a court action, our justice system would be busy for the next ten years clearing the backlog for just today's infractions. By itself, there's no way that any law, legal action, or technical solution, can even scratch the surface. But what if the point is publicity? A shock and awe campaign that uses lawsuits instead of bombs. The more outrageous, the more press, and the more press, the more people become fearful. Have you noticed that these press releases, actions, and articles, occur on a fairly consistent tick-tock cycle of about three months? It has been going on for years.
This is a public relations campaign... and whenever you're asking how X will react to Y, you're playing right into it. X and Y don't matter. No, honestly, they don't: Statistically, you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than getting in trouble for file sharing. My service provider is one of those who promised to impliment the new "six strikes" policy, to much hoopla in the press. That was six months ago. Every month since then, I've downloaded an average of 960GB of pirated material, a lot of it on the "Top 100" list off The Pirate Bay. No letter. No e-mail. Not even a peep about the bandwidth being used. I'm supposed to be in that "top 1%" that they insist they're pursuing all possible legal actions against. No knocks on the door. No black helicopters. My life has continued just as it has before. And I've been doing this for over a decade. I'm not hiding behind proxies, or encrypting my traffic, or doing anything special really at all. It's all right there for anyone to look at.
Nobody has. Even with all the automation, all the legal power, all of the everything that you've heard about... there are still hundreds of millions of people just like me worldwide. Statistics are not in their favor here guys. So the question isn't how Canada will react... the question is: How will you? Because that's the goal of all of this -- it's changing your behavior through fear and doubt. It's an appeal to your emotions -- visions of going to jail and losing everything you ever owned and loved while they parade you out in front of the media. That's the big sell.
Yeah, I disagreed with you! I insulted the status quo and for that I should suffer! Mod me down! Mod me down quick, that heretic! For though I speak a truth that is written into the constitution of dozens of countries around the world, it's blasphemous in the one you live in! Set that woman on fire and burn her at the stake for disagreeing with our great and ignoble institution of greed and pilloried cash! Yes, slashmods! Do your patriotic duty! You must -1 this heathen, or others may hear her siren call and realize that, indeed, millions of peasants are suffering because some political ideology is fashionable right here and now!
It's deeply troubling that the response to "tuitions are too high" is "not everyone needs to go to college" these days. Education is not a luxury that we can afford to go without, it is civilization itself.
Tell that to the slashmods, who increasingly seem to be showing a similar lack of education and thus civilization. -1 disagree! -1 no girls allowed! -1 not status quo!
Let's be honest: You're getting that degree to get a better job and/or shut your parents up. There are no other reasons for the majority of students outside of highly specialized fields like engineering, medicine, or law, where you have to pass a formalized state exam and screwing up can have side effects like, I don't know, people dying. For the rest of us though, there's very little you actually need to learn, and the rest is just fluff you don't care about (and neither does any potential employer). College these days is one giant rip-off created by the rich to enslave the poor under massive debt loads.
Anyone who can find a way around the system has my vote, nay, my standing ovation. The whole system is a joke; it's the result of colleges becoming privatized and profit-orientated. Some things simply shouldn't be... education is one such thing. That's why we're losing ground to every country that didn't take this ass-backwards "free market" approach to education. It's a right, and everybody gets it -- that's how it should be.
"sheeple" - If you think the government is bad now, it would be a lot worse if people who use that term had any real power.
I don't think our government's going to get any better or worse based solely on what words our elected officials use. I only say this based on over a decade in IT, where the names of everything have changed many, many times, but the problems haven't.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess "Asteroid Misses Earth, Just Like It's Done Every 4 Years For Millennia" just wasn't catchy enough.
What I find interesting is the helpful picture of what an asteroid "50-165 feet across" might look like hitting the Earth. Boy, the size of a foot sure has changed since I last checked...
Depends on how common they are, and where. If it's somewhere near Mexican border, it's not exactly surprising.
Funny, you didn't mention that as a condition when you said that doesn't ever happen here. Now it's been revised to well it doesn't happen that much. And if I posted pics showing cops on every street corner frisking citizens, goose stepping down the streets, you'd still say "Well at least their uniforms look more professional." Please man, go home. You fail at life.
. I was talking about rows and rows of buildings that have broken windows and, in parts, walls - but which people live in nevertheless, because they don't have any better place to live. With large families with lots of kids.
We call that "the south" here.
So I don't really see the point of arguing further. If Egypt is so much better, why don't you just move there?
Reducto ad absurdum... if you can't beat 'em, hand wave 'em! Perhaps you forgot my original point: Which is that we shouldn't be so high and mighty about the civil rights infractions of other countries when our record isn't exactly full of sunshine and kittens either. A point you steadfastly refuse to acknowledge, despite the overwhelming evidence against you. I bet if I argued right now the air in Egypt was slightly more oxygenated than here, you'd start wailing about how that might be true but the oxygen in our air is better oxygen. Quality over quantity, am I right?
Please.
Also, it's one thing when there's a large concentration of police force during protests or other big event. Completely another when it is a day-to-day, routine thing.
Do routine traffic stops with a tank count?
In the capital, you don't.
Washington, D.C. has a very high murder rate; Well above national average. It's actually on par with Detroit.
Is that why they had cops with full-size AKs on every street corner in the tourist quarter last time I visited (which was in 2005)?
Have you visited New York lately?
...because the city blocks surrounding it would be most accurately described as something you'd expect to see in the aftermath of a bombing run on the city.
Yeah, we don't have that problem.
Numbers are funny things, especially self-reported ones.
Yes. The CIA and the United Nations are colluding with each other to make places like Egypt, Iran, and Iraq look better.
so know illegal aliens getting arrested for blocking traffic is the same as jailing someone for posting something some peoples club considers offensive?
*winces at the bad english* Freedom of expression must have a very different definition in your world.
your violent crime examples of homicides, not violent crime. Of course, rape and violence on women is rarely reported, and even less frequently documented. so you link is less facts and more half truth.
Yeah, what was I thinking, using the most reported and documented violent crime as a baseline reference? Silly me.
The crime rate was low in Germany During the Nazi regime. Is that really an argument that Nazi Germans is better then the US, or any country?
You Godwin'd yourself. But ignoring that, there's about 11 million dead Jews and political prisoners that would disagree about the crime rate. But you know, other than that, there's also the problem of there not being any statistics on the crime rate or population of the Third Reich for the past 67 years.
That said, I suspect that there rate of imprisonment is lower then the US. The USs prison increase is doe toy the privatization of prisons.
Every time you post something to the internet, God kills a dictionary. The ownership of our prisons has as much relationship to the reasons why so many are jailed each year as your literary shortcomings do to the number of books Amazon sells each year.
the truth is, they aren't better. All your metrics ignore what life is like for over half their population.
I will admit I have more confidence that the CIA, the United Nations, The Harvard Institute of Law, and a handful of major news outlets got the numbers right than I do in a person on the internet literary abilities of a fifth grader, who is backing up his argument with no citations, logical reasoning, or even an anecdotal story.
However our country can, and has many times, changed without needing a revolution.
I'm skeptical of this claim that stuff has happened many times. I don't think stuff happens many times. In fact, I'd even go as far as to call myself a stuff skeptic. I'm going to need a citation from you that the country has done stuff, and that this stuff has happened many times. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proof, you know.
We do live in a country where you can have a different house of worship on each corner at an intersect and nothing violent happens.
Can I suggest you open a newspaper someday?
...it can cover multiple orbital trajectories while imperialist pig Yankee capitalist satellites are only capable of a single orbit.
Our spy satellites can cover multiple orbital trajectories too, and without exploding a few weeks after launch or burning up in the atmosphere. Oh, and you might want to get that mole on your back looked at; Our intelligence analysts think it might be cancerous. Or not. We're just saying, after spending so much money on surveillance watching your every move, it'd be a shame to waste the investment. By the way, kudos on your launch. No really, we mean that -- we're really impressed you can do that when most of your country doesn't even have electricity or basic cable for your citizens to watch.
Sincerely,
Your Imperialist Pig Yankee Capitalist friends.
2 - If anybody actually thought that the eqyptian government was going to be all good now because of the uprising clearly has not been paying attention. Id love to visit but not until there is another revolution there.
There's a few things about Egypt you should probably know. For one thing, the poverty rate there isn't much worse there than the United States (15% versus 20%) despite the radically different size of the economy and median income ($6k versus $40k). And before you jump down my throat on "proving that", I sourced that information from the CIA World Factbook. They have a significantly lower violent crime rate than here as well -- almost four times less (and yes, I can back that up too from a reliable source, The UN Office on Drugs and Crime. And when it comes to jailing people, the United States ranks #1. Egypt? #165. (Oh yes, sourced that too).
So when you get all uppity about how they're jailing a blogger for three years for publishing something anti-muslim, I want you to remember the terror watch lists. I want you to remember Guantanamo Bay. I want you to think of the hundreds of political prisoners (Citation? Got you covered. I assume Harvard Law School is prestigious enough?) we ignore. You talk about media control and manipulation in other countries like Egypt like they're somehow worse than those of the west.
The truth is... they're better. Three years for pissing off the government here is a comparatively light sentence: We put people in jail for at least a year for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Don't ask for a revolution before considering visiting Egypt. Chances are good, your country needs one more.
We need to start looking at them as performance art.
Historically, there's been nothing artistic about the performance of Internet Explorer, except perhaps in the wide and varied ways in which it catches fire. That said... someone really needed to have screwed the pooch to make this vulnerability possible; Windows by default won't dump mouse movement events into a window or control's message queue unless it's directly over it, and the x,y coordinates are usually relative not absolute (though one can make a dll call to get the absolute coordinates). But then, IE happily chirps your display devices' absolute size in HTTP requests, and its bag on the side ".hta" files and associated total bypass of normal security in order to turn internet explorer into some kind of interpreter for standalone applications may have something to due with this monumental screwup.
And make no mistake: They had to screw up pretty good to make this one possible. Normal windows applications just don't work like this.
You have utterly succeeded in missing the point - you are an aberration.
Or you succeeded in missing the point: That this is what it's come to and even average people should start considering doing this.
"[...]All the necessary pieces already exist, they just haven't been combined yet.'"
Not me. I'm behind ten proxies and use Tor for everything. I use throwaway e-mail addresses from places like Mailinator. I even registered my gmail account using a hospital courtesy phone... that was in another country. My friends joke that I'm paranoid of the government. No, I could care less about the government... it's all the corporations!
Um, then you should receive a 3D gun, the packaging for a credit card skimmer, or a timing circuit. Haven't we gotten past this "make the tools illegal" crap yet? It's what you do with them, not the item itself that's problematic, and there are valid uses for all the above.
I've tried telling my government that... but they keep arresting, torturing, threatening, and imprisoning me whenever I do. I'm also on a whole bunch of watch lists, kill lists, security lists, lists of lists, databases of lists, lists of databases... I don't even know anymore whether I'm coded green, yellow, orange, additional screening, deportation... it seems like they come up with new ways to criminalize things every day. I don't know a single person who isn't a felon anymore... the only difference is, not all of them have been caught or pissed in the cheerios of someone "important".
Okay, what if I submit a design to print a 3D gun (or replacement parts for one)? What about the packaging for, say, a credit card skimmer? How about a timing circuit made entirely out of electrically-conductive plastic (so it doesn't show up on an x-ray scanner)? I can only hope they look at the things being submitted; But I'm reminded of the scene in Batman begins where Alfred says, "Well, we'll have to order a lot of them in order to avoid suspicion." "Oh? How many?" "About ten thousand sir." "Well, at least we'll have spares."
3D printers open up a whole new world for both good and bad applications. If they aren't thinking about this now, they should start -- because someone else is reading this right now and tapping their fingers together saying "myes, myes my pretties..."
And for the record, I'd gladly pay a small stipend every month to skip the rigamarole of setting up filters, searches, rss feeds, and the sorting and what-not (it takes about 5, sometimes 10 minutes every few days) and wasting so much bandwidth if there was a legitimate service that met my needs. And it's not a high bar to clear; Be commercial free. Be high quality (I can wait hours or days -- just make it good, not Netflix instashit). Be complete. And be timely. So far, not a single commercial offering has managed to even hit two out of four. They're all have licensing problems and such with the studios -- Netflix can't show you something until it's been out for a month, but Redbox can. Timely? No. High quality? Everything that's out there is streaming -- and it's all universally shit. I'm patient; but I guess there's no market for people like me who actually enjoy high quality video and audio and not mrrrfffwhaaarrggrrrble audio and blotchy artifact-covered action sequences. And none of the offerings are even complete! Licensing fucks every last offering there is -- nobody has everything I want to watch. Nobody is even close... and Netflix' streaming service' collection really only contains the popular shows. Try finding, say, classic Dr. Who. Nope -- fuck you, they say, it's not worth our time and effort.
Piracy delivers what no commercial offering can. I say this honestly: I'd pay real money if they could just get their collective heads out of their asses and play nice with each other. Piracy doesn't exist because people like to "steal", it exists because these dumb bastards are dinosaurs engaged in endless mating rituals with much ripping of grass and beating of chest, and fuck the customer man, what do they know about the market, am I right? x_x Well, speaking as a customer, I know only one thing: You don't have what I want. Goodbye.
Sure, the mean contains some information. But the standard deviation contains just as much, if not more! Very seldom do I see anything from which sigma could be inferred, yet whenever you collect data for averages, you can easily calc sigma.
I can understand and appreciate your frustration; I share it. But let's be honest: The average person doesn't understand sigma, standard deviation, margin of error, or any of those other statistical concepts. They do like "Top 10" lists though and rankings. And for these things, averages are usually the best metric, even if they don't tell the whole story, or even a particularly accurate one.
The other thing is, most of the ISPs on that list are using some variety of traffic shaping. Internet users don't care whether their download takes 5 minutes or 5 minutes and 30 seconds... but they're going to throw a hissy fit if their video starts in 10 seconds instead of 4, even if the remaining duration plays without a problem. Needless to say, ISPs aren't blind to this -- they prioritize traffic to sites like Netflix. Or, in the case of mobile providers... they throw it under the bus. But network neutrality doesn't exist in the United States or the UK, which is where Netflix operates... so even a detailed statistical analysis wouldn't be terribly useful.
We can't expect the average person, with the attention spa--oh look a kitty! ... to be bothered to see the deeper truth that a full statistical exploration would reveal. Bluntly, they're too stupid to either know, or care.
Something tells me you'll never have enough time to watch/listen/play all that content, particularly if you've acquired nearly a terabyte within 6 months
Mmmm, average 1080p HQ bluray rip: 10GB. 40 minutes of a 720p HQ TV episode: about 1.25GB. 75% of my video watching time goes to TV episodes like The Daily Show, Mythbusters, etc. The other 25% goes to movies. So the total for the 900 TB of data I pulled last month equates to about 19.8 hours a day of high quality video (the only kind I download). That said, the problem is a lot of it is automated by feeds and searches. About 10--15% of the TV episodes are later repacked as "proper" tagged, meaning that there may have been a few seconds of commercial added, or a sync or clipping issue, etc. Many of the TV episodes pulled are dups; I pick the highest quality one out of each batch. When you take it all into consideration, about 2/3rds of what I download for TV episodes is later deleted or remuxed. Movies do not have these same problems -- only about 15% of movies are discarded. So while yes, it does seem like a lot, due to the quality control problems, I'm really only getting around 5.5--6 hours of archivable video. And out of that, I probably throw another third of it away because I am doing the pirate equivalent of channel surfing -- seeing what else is out there, but usually finding it lacking. So in the end, I'm really only watching 2--3 hours of video a day. For comparison, the average person watches about 5 hours of TV a day. Average. But about a third of what they watch (if not more) is commercials. When you take that into account... my viewing habits are actually average. I just skip all the commercials, non-skippable content, etc. I watch just what I want, the way I want, where and when I want.
That's why I'm a pirate. Simply put, it's just a better use of my time than wading through the crap-flood everyone else does; I get an extra 2.5 hours every day to spend not being a mindless consumer-droid. That's 2.5 hours I can put towards excercising, or cooking something other than TV dinners. That's time I can spend with my family playing games, or working on coding projects, or reading. Being a pirate means I get 10.4% more time in a day than someone who isn't.
Comparing the current state of the art and complaining that what we fielded 30 years ago was a waste is not valid.
Perhaps, but NASA has had major managment issues from the start. Go read Appendix D of the Challenger Disaster report, by one Mr. Feynman, who had to fight tooth and nail to expose the institutional problems that led to the problem. It's since become a case study in how not to manage a project and is required reading in several prominent engineering companies. The design of the shuttle engines, while amazing pieces of technology, were not built according to best practices -- it was literally put together as a whole system and then tested as a completed unit rather than integrating each subsystem after extensive testing and comparison with expected baseline. Debugging the damn thing was exceptionally problematic and to this day it's still not known if all the possible failure modes and bugs have been found and documented. Management showed a long pattern of decreasing safety standards and bypassing procedural safeguards to maintain their image as "cutting edge".
NASA still suffers from those problems today, and private contractors and now the USAF have proven that the technology is actually not all that sophisticated nor requiring the massive administrative overhead that is so typical of NASA missions and daily operations. They've done it faster, better, and cheaper than NASA did, and their success lies not in copying existing technology, or inventing new technology, but in having good project management skills and not letting committee thinking and politics mangle and derail the whole thing, leading to massive cost overruns.
Bruce Schneider just facepalmed. How many times do you people need to be told client side security doesn't work? Of course the Windows 8 store got hacked: No matter how much you try to lock it down, all you're doing is just giving some bored teenagers and underemployed/unemployed programmers something to challenge them. The Playstation 3 had some very advanced client-side security. It still got broken. It took them awhile, but it fell, as all client side security must. If you have physical access to the hardware, you own it. It may take a mod chip, it may take a special program, or technical knowledge, but the problem is one that although the skillset required to hack it may be highly specialized, once that single success happens, everybody reaps the benefits within hours to months. And there are far more bored engineers than there are DRM proponents. All client-side DRM has ever accomplished is frustrating and annoying paying customers.
This isn't news. This isn't even interesting. Hell, let's be honest here -- how many of you work at a company that has plans to migrate to Windows 8? Support it for people who have it at home? How many of you are planning on making it your primary operating system?
I see very few hands. This operating system exploded on the launch pad. It's an attempt to emulate Apple, and they botched it so hard that senior Microsoft executives will be getting handed pink slips by the end of next year -- I'd wager serious money on that. Microsoft lost its ability to innovate awhile ago... now it just follows where the market goes, maintaining a profit margin but never pushing the margins of the technology. The reasons for this are many and beyond the scope of this post...
But don't act surprised when someone cracks a client-side security scheme. No implimentation of it has denied a determined attacker with the resources of a private individual or (at worst) a small company to date. It has a fundamental design flaw that cannot be corrected.
Education is still very affordable in most fields for anyone who bothers to take the time to plan it out before committing.
My bullshit-o-meter just broke on that. Seriously, you killed it. Let's roll some numbers, mkays?
Now tuition doesn't cover the cost of books (That'll be another $600), or supplies ($250), or any incidentals you may need like a computer, car, furniture, etc. But we'll ignore those incidentals -- you're still looking at about $20 grand a year. Most of these things you aren't going to have at 18 unless your parents were affluent and gave them to you. Which means... you're gonna have to buy them to live on your own. Even with a roomate. Or several. Oh wait... you have no employable skills -- that's what you're going to college for!. Say hello to minimum wage at $9.50 an hour. And from 18-25, the student loans you can take out are capped, and although most parents do not contribute to their child's education, outdated calcuations based on your parents' income still determine eligibility for a wide variety of assistance programs. Your first year of college will be capped at $5,500 in loans. That's only a mere $14,500 short of what you need to survive your first year. But hey, let's say you take that summer job and you work a full 40 hours a week for three months straight (ahahahaa! Crazy, I know, but Republicans believe it's possible, so let's play along)... Congratulations! Your full time job has earned you... $4,936 gross. Oh wait... forgot taxes. That'll be $4,066.. net.
OH NOES! You're still short $10,434. So about that "very affordable" and how you were "not even exceptional effort" bit? How about a nice resounding Fuck you from the Department Of People Who Can Do Basic Math. There's a reason there's a trillion plus dollar student loan crisis out there, and an entire generation going bankrupt. You don't get to just handwave and say "Well, I was smart. Everyone else was just stupid." It doesn't work that way. You got lucky. Most people didn't. Statistical. Factual. Truth.
It actually makes me want to torrent it, even though I don't torrent movies, or have any interest in watching it.
Maybe that's the point. It's such a shitty movie the only way to get publicity for it is to say "We're suing the pants off people for this!" It makes it sound like it's valuable. Like they're wasting millions of dollars and throwing armies of lawyers at it because it's worth defending. The reality is... it's a shitty movie and there's way too much marketing research saying that people who pirate are also their most reliable customers. If you wanted to get your sales numbers up... what better way than to get your most reliable customers to say "Hey, I see smoke over there. Must be a fire, let's go check it out!"
Never believe the reason 'they' state (the generic ominous 'they', which applies to any group with an agenda); You look at the effect. That's almost always the reason for the action taken. The few times it isn't, they stop right away and spin the hell out of it... which us laypeople refer to as a Fuck Up.
will Canadian courts be amicable to these tactics after changes to copyright law were made specifically to prevent the predatory legal entanglement of Canadian citizens? Will the studio actually attempt to pursue the situation beyond the proliferation of threatening extortion letters? How would the already-clogged courts react to what amounts to denial-of-service attack on the judicial system?"
The better question is: What incentive is there for the industry to stop? The United States has proved militarily, economically, and in many other ways that shock and awe are a powerful combination to ensure compliance. Not that they're the first -- the Romans did the same thing, as did many cultures before them as well. The fact is, the only thing they're losing is a tiny amount of money and they're getting huge amounts of press out of it.
Has it ever occurred to anyone that the laws and lawyers and letters and posturing isn't meant to actually have an impact? Statistically, it can't. If right now, today, everyone who was sharing files just for today was dragged into a court action, our justice system would be busy for the next ten years clearing the backlog for just today's infractions. By itself, there's no way that any law, legal action, or technical solution, can even scratch the surface. But what if the point is publicity? A shock and awe campaign that uses lawsuits instead of bombs. The more outrageous, the more press, and the more press, the more people become fearful. Have you noticed that these press releases, actions, and articles, occur on a fairly consistent tick-tock cycle of about three months? It has been going on for years.
This is a public relations campaign... and whenever you're asking how X will react to Y, you're playing right into it. X and Y don't matter. No, honestly, they don't: Statistically, you have a better chance of being struck by lightning than getting in trouble for file sharing. My service provider is one of those who promised to impliment the new "six strikes" policy, to much hoopla in the press. That was six months ago. Every month since then, I've downloaded an average of 960GB of pirated material, a lot of it on the "Top 100" list off The Pirate Bay. No letter. No e-mail. Not even a peep about the bandwidth being used. I'm supposed to be in that "top 1%" that they insist they're pursuing all possible legal actions against. No knocks on the door. No black helicopters. My life has continued just as it has before. And I've been doing this for over a decade. I'm not hiding behind proxies, or encrypting my traffic, or doing anything special really at all. It's all right there for anyone to look at.
Nobody has. Even with all the automation, all the legal power, all of the everything that you've heard about... there are still hundreds of millions of people just like me worldwide. Statistics are not in their favor here guys. So the question isn't how Canada will react... the question is: How will you? Because that's the goal of all of this -- it's changing your behavior through fear and doubt. It's an appeal to your emotions -- visions of going to jail and losing everything you ever owned and loved while they parade you out in front of the media. That's the big sell.
So... are you buying?
Yeah, I disagreed with you! I insulted the status quo and for that I should suffer! Mod me down! Mod me down quick, that heretic! For though I speak a truth that is written into the constitution of dozens of countries around the world, it's blasphemous in the one you live in! Set that woman on fire and burn her at the stake for disagreeing with our great and ignoble institution of greed and pilloried cash! Yes, slashmods! Do your patriotic duty! You must -1 this heathen, or others may hear her siren call and realize that, indeed, millions of peasants are suffering because some political ideology is fashionable right here and now!
It's deeply troubling that the response to "tuitions are too high" is "not everyone needs to go to college" these days. Education is not a luxury that we can afford to go without, it is civilization itself.
Tell that to the slashmods, who increasingly seem to be showing a similar lack of education and thus civilization. -1 disagree! -1 no girls allowed! -1 not status quo!
Let's be honest: You're getting that degree to get a better job and/or shut your parents up. There are no other reasons for the majority of students outside of highly specialized fields like engineering, medicine, or law, where you have to pass a formalized state exam and screwing up can have side effects like, I don't know, people dying. For the rest of us though, there's very little you actually need to learn, and the rest is just fluff you don't care about (and neither does any potential employer). College these days is one giant rip-off created by the rich to enslave the poor under massive debt loads.
Anyone who can find a way around the system has my vote, nay, my standing ovation. The whole system is a joke; it's the result of colleges becoming privatized and profit-orientated. Some things simply shouldn't be... education is one such thing. That's why we're losing ground to every country that didn't take this ass-backwards "free market" approach to education. It's a right, and everybody gets it -- that's how it should be.
Who mentioned the NSA? Apart from you, I mean?
Ah yes Vanna, I'd like to buy a vowel please? Another 'A'.
"sheeple" - If you think the government is bad now, it would be a lot worse if people who use that term had any real power.
I don't think our government's going to get any better or worse based solely on what words our elected officials use. I only say this based on over a decade in IT, where the names of everything have changed many, many times, but the problems haven't.