So, the lifetime account is being revoked when the lifetime of the service expires. Sounds fair to me. What, you didn't think it was the lifetime of the customer they were talking about, did you?
No, the use of == is correct here. He's certainly not assigning the value of WTFV to RTFA. He's stating the equivalence of RTFA and WTFV. Since the article is in video form, the only way to read the article is to watch the video. If you've watched the video, you've read the article. If you haven't watched, you haven't read. They can both be true, or they can both be false. Either way, (RTFA == WTFV) evaluates to true.
It would be better to write RTFA â WTFV, of course, but slashdot doesn't believe in unicode and mangles the three-bar STRICTLY EQUIVALENT TO glyph I put between RTFA and WTFV.
Yeah, but let's be fair. That bundle contains two novelty albums (at least one of which is a greatest hits album), one video game soundtrack, one pretentious neo-classical album, and two albums of remixes. None of this stuff is anything that would even interest the major labels, so it's not like the artists are taking any big risk releasing it this way.
Don't get me wrong. I bought the bundle and enjoyed most of it. (TMBG's brass band remix of "Mr. Me" alone was worth the price!) I just don't really feel like this collection of curiosities is stickin' it to the man.
Although I agree with the headline, I disagree with the article. The article says we should be interested in space missions because of the toil, hard work, and sacrifice of the people involved, even for robotic missions. That it's a cryin' shame that NASA doesn't put out highly-produced specials detailing the lives of these driven men and women.
Bullshit.
That's the worst part of any sporting event televised in the US. They spend all this time on the "human interest" angle that they never get around to showing us the action. I don't care that so-and-so spent 10 years working out 23 hours a day and eating nothing but Wheaties, or that his dedication to his craft cost him his marriage, his truck, and his dog. My wife is a sports nut, and she DVRs the events just so she can skip that crap. For the Olympics she goes out of her way to find foreign coverage so she can see events which don't have a big-name American athlete competing.
Okay, somebody out there must like the human interest stuff. Maybe that would be a way to make science appealing to the masses, to the people who watch all those wretched reality shows and follow the celebrity gossip. But do we really need yet another cult of celebrity?
No, it is about someone "being offended". That's all it takes with a zero tolerance policy to get someone fired. Someone is offended, a complaint is filed, the offender is fired. End of sentence. No recourse or apology possible. It happened to me. Something I said was taken the wrong way and the next thing I knew I was out on the street. I don't even know who was offended. I didn't get a chance to explain or apologize.
Zero tolerance policies just plain suck. They eliminate any rational evaluation of the situation and only serve as a legal CYA for the company; they don't actually improve the work environment. In my case a simple, "Hey, someone thought you meant..." was all it would have taken.
Most of the political poll calls I get are scams, but not the type that are really trying to sell cruise packages. "We'd like your input on these very important issues. Would you vote for the opposition candidate who's for truth, justice, and the American way; or re-elect the incumbent candidate who voted against the Puppies, Orphans and Nuns act? Would your opinion be different if we told you that they were *really cute* puppies? And that orphans all froze to death? And the nuns ended up turning feral? Press 1 to save America. Press 2 to let the terrorists win."
What's to convert? We're talking about new games here. If the developer would like them to one day be distributed on Steam, they're certainly going to design them with Steam in mind. Single-player games need little or no work to be usable on Steam. The Steam client already has a wrapper to let you use the Steam overlays (chat, etc.) within arbitrary games if you use Steam as the launcher. The little bit of actual work would be to throw in some dumb "achievements" and allow games to be saved on the Steam servers. And if the programmers at Valve are at all competent, saving to the server should use an API that's a drop-in replacement for native file I/O.
Multi-player games probably need (slightly) more work to function with Steam's backend. But still, it's not Valve doing it. It's the game developer working with the Steam SDK.
The only work Valve has to do is to add the title to the store, maybe format the screenshots into something that looks good as an advertisement, and cash the checks. In fact, I'm really surprised that Steam hasn't already turned into a cesspool of cheap-ass amateur crap like the Apple App Store has.
Let me start by saying that I'm not particularly concerned about the privacy issues regarding smart meters. But I do understand why people are.
1. It's not enough that the utility doesn't store high-resolution data. The issue is that they can. Right now it's not worth doing. But 10 years from now, when petabyte drives are sold as loss-leaders at Best Buy, who's to say that it's no longer worth storing whatever random scraps of information? It may in fact be cheaper to simply store everything than it is to figure out how to filter it.
2. Just because the utility doesn't store everything for everybody, they have the ability to store everything from a particular meter. That makes them a nice easy target for law enforcement officers. Since warrants for data collection seem to be entirely optional, it's not hard to imagine periodic data collection expeditions as police scan logs for particular suspects of a crime. Or just plain fishing, looking for any suspicious usage patterns.
3. And because the utility can collect the high-res data, and because law enforcement finds it so convenient, how long until some bright "tough on crime" congressman gets a bug up his butt about making such collection mandatory? With a data feed going directly to the FBI? What, you want the terrorists to win or something?
4. And lets not forget about burglars and anyone else wanting to break into a house getting access to the data. It's a treasure trove of information about who's home, when. But the data's encrypted, right? Sure it is. And I'll bet there's some sort of sideband attack that may not expose the raw data but will expose enough to be useful to a bad guy.
5. And even if they can't directly crack the encryption between the meter and the utility, what about that spiffy Web 2.0 front end (with free iPhone and Android apps!) that lets the customer track his usage? Who needs to break the low-level stuff when you can craft an SQL injection attack that returns the entire DB, sorted and collated any way you want?
I think these are problems that need to be addressed. Personally I expect that the benefits outweigh the risks, but I can see how reasonable people would disagree with that assessment.
Set the household firewall to block ports 80 and 443 for the kid's computer, but allow other ports for games. (You specifically mentioned games, and games seldom work well through a proxy.)
Set up their browser to use the proxy. It doesn't matter if they disable this or switch browsers, because the router is going to block most web sites.
Write a script to summarize the squid logs and mail them to you and your kid daily.
Write a cron job to automatically change the proxy acls to "deny" after bedtime. Don't write one to automatically change the acls to "allow"; make them ask you for permission. It's a pain in the ass for both of you, but you'll know when they're using it (and it gives you a good time to ask them if they've done their homework/chores for the day).
That's pretty much it. Porn sites stand out pretty clearly on the log summary. Sort by bytes transferred. Actual porn site visits will have a lot of traffic, incidental visits (ie., a banner ad that slipped past AdBlock) will only have a little.
This technique allows you to know when they're browsing. It actually blocks very little, but they know that you'll know where they went. Yeah, some crap will unintentionally slip through. You can't help that, and if you're that allergic to boobies maybe you shouldn't let the kids browse by themselves anyway. If they've gone out of their way to find stuff you can talk to them about it. "Son, what's this gigabyte transferred from 'hentai-babes.com'?" If possible, get their mom to talk to them. There's nothing a teenage boy likes more than explaining his porn tastes to his mom.
There's a side benefit in that it'll help teach your kids networking. Nothing gets them to learn faster than standing between them and their porn! I'm just sad that my kid hasn't figured out how to spoof his MAC address yet. Or if he has, he's also figured out how to keep from showing up as an unknown device in the DHCP logs. And if that's the case, he's earned his dirty pictures.
Agreed. Very good books, which I also read in my pre-teen years. 8 may be a little young, but it's worth a shot. I've been watching Falling Skies with my 14yo and it strikes me that Falling Skies could almost be a prequel to the Tripods. The details don't quite line up, but the alien invasion and subjugation of the human race with mind control devices are similar enough. (Yes, I know about When The Tripods Came, though I haven't read it.)
Also try Terry Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind. It's kind of a Last Starfighter story. His other young adult fiction might also be good, but I haven't read any of it.
I haven't read any of them, but the Jupiter series is a conscious effort by Charles Sheffield to produce modern SF stories reminiscent of Heinlein's juvenile novels.
Are the Danny Dunn books still around? Those had a bunch of science and SF themes, though they probably seem very dated by now. As my wife points out, any books supposedly set in the present day need to acknowledge the existence of cell phones or they'll look outdated. If the characters are in a tough situation that revolves around them being isolated, you need to explain why they can't just text each other or call 911.
I'm a Brit who emigrated to the US about 10 years ago. One thing I found very hard to get used to was that the taste of nearly all food in the US is sickeningly sweet. It makes it all taste the same as you can hardly even taste the natural flavor of the food itself.
I'm still boggling at the idea of a Brit critiquing food. You are aware that there are preparation methods apart from boiling, right?
Sure, you can turn off secure boot. Go into setup, uncheck the "Enable Secure Boot" option. Click past the dialog that reads, "WARNING! Turning off Secure Boot will make you vulnerable to hackers! Do you really want to let the cyberterrorists win (y/N)?" Or similar text which will be equally scary to non-technical users.
OS vendors other than MS will have three choices: Get their key included by the all the motherboard manufacturers; pay MS to sign their bootloader; or subject their users to the Scary Dialog of Cyberdoom. Everyone here understands that it's just FUD. But will the average computer user understand it? It's creating a sense of "Microsoft == Security" and "Others == Trousers Around Your Ankles". Ooh, better stick with Windows or the cyberboogieman will get you!
And on top of it all, I give it less than a year before MS's master private key is leaked, stolen, or otherwise hacked to render "Secure Boot" about as secure and useful as WEP or CSS (the DVD kind, not the Web 2.0 kind).
Where's the control for this experiment? How about posting a similar but completely factual article? I bet you'd get the same results -- no response on Wikipedia, and a dogpile of people on Reddit calling "FAKE!"
Yup. If there was a group of people dead-set on destroying the United States, that's where they should start. Bomb the security checkpoints. By definition they're insecure areas, and they have lots of people milling about. Bomb an airport security queue and you'll stop all air travel for a couple days. Bomb two or three simultaneously and you'll stop air travel for weeks. Randomly bomb other queues, such as train stations or sporting events or concerts, and you'll panic the the nation so badly we'll collectively shit ourselves to death. You win! It'd be easy to do, especially if you have a few people willing to martyr themselves for the cause.
Now, this hasn't happened yet in over a decade since the WTC attacks. What does that tell you about the existence of the bogeyman that we're being told is lurking just around the corner?
I don't want anyone else to read your ideas ever again.
What do you think it's the correct behaviour:
A - I stop reading you.
B - I ask slashdot to block all your posts for everyone unless they opt-in.
FTFY. This is really the issue at hand. It's not that the people proposing the law don't want to see porn, it's that they don't want anyone else seeing it. Err, I mean, they don't want the children to see it. Adults should have the right to, of course. Just opt-in by putting your name on this list titled "Probable Sex Offenders" and you can look at your porn again. You perv.
Slashdot Mirror
So, the lifetime account is being revoked when the lifetime of the service expires. Sounds fair to me. What, you didn't think it was the lifetime of the customer they were talking about, did you?
No, the use of == is correct here. He's certainly not assigning the value of WTFV to RTFA. He's stating the equivalence of RTFA and WTFV. Since the article is in video form, the only way to read the article is to watch the video. If you've watched the video, you've read the article. If you haven't watched, you haven't read. They can both be true, or they can both be false. Either way, (RTFA == WTFV) evaluates to true.
It would be better to write RTFA â WTFV, of course, but slashdot doesn't believe in unicode and mangles the three-bar STRICTLY EQUIVALENT TO glyph I put between RTFA and WTFV.
Yeah, but let's be fair. That bundle contains two novelty albums (at least one of which is a greatest hits album), one video game soundtrack, one pretentious neo-classical album, and two albums of remixes. None of this stuff is anything that would even interest the major labels, so it's not like the artists are taking any big risk releasing it this way. Don't get me wrong. I bought the bundle and enjoyed most of it. (TMBG's brass band remix of "Mr. Me" alone was worth the price!) I just don't really feel like this collection of curiosities is stickin' it to the man.
Although I agree with the headline, I disagree with the article. The article says we should be interested in space missions because of the toil, hard work, and sacrifice of the people involved, even for robotic missions. That it's a cryin' shame that NASA doesn't put out highly-produced specials detailing the lives of these driven men and women.
Bullshit.
That's the worst part of any sporting event televised in the US. They spend all this time on the "human interest" angle that they never get around to showing us the action. I don't care that so-and-so spent 10 years working out 23 hours a day and eating nothing but Wheaties, or that his dedication to his craft cost him his marriage, his truck, and his dog. My wife is a sports nut, and she DVRs the events just so she can skip that crap. For the Olympics she goes out of her way to find foreign coverage so she can see events which don't have a big-name American athlete competing.
Okay, somebody out there must like the human interest stuff. Maybe that would be a way to make science appealing to the masses, to the people who watch all those wretched reality shows and follow the celebrity gossip. But do we really need yet another cult of celebrity?
No, it is about someone "being offended". That's all it takes with a zero tolerance policy to get someone fired. Someone is offended, a complaint is filed, the offender is fired. End of sentence. No recourse or apology possible. It happened to me. Something I said was taken the wrong way and the next thing I knew I was out on the street. I don't even know who was offended. I didn't get a chance to explain or apologize.
Zero tolerance policies just plain suck. They eliminate any rational evaluation of the situation and only serve as a legal CYA for the company; they don't actually improve the work environment. In my case a simple, "Hey, someone thought you meant..." was all it would have taken.
Often, all three at once.
Most of the political poll calls I get are scams, but not the type that are really trying to sell cruise packages. "We'd like your input on these very important issues. Would you vote for the opposition candidate who's for truth, justice, and the American way; or re-elect the incumbent candidate who voted against the Puppies, Orphans and Nuns act? Would your opinion be different if we told you that they were *really cute* puppies? And that orphans all froze to death? And the nuns ended up turning feral? Press 1 to save America. Press 2 to let the terrorists win."
What's to convert? We're talking about new games here. If the developer would like them to one day be distributed on Steam, they're certainly going to design them with Steam in mind. Single-player games need little or no work to be usable on Steam. The Steam client already has a wrapper to let you use the Steam overlays (chat, etc.) within arbitrary games if you use Steam as the launcher. The little bit of actual work would be to throw in some dumb "achievements" and allow games to be saved on the Steam servers. And if the programmers at Valve are at all competent, saving to the server should use an API that's a drop-in replacement for native file I/O.
Multi-player games probably need (slightly) more work to function with Steam's backend. But still, it's not Valve doing it. It's the game developer working with the Steam SDK.
The only work Valve has to do is to add the title to the store, maybe format the screenshots into something that looks good as an advertisement, and cash the checks. In fact, I'm really surprised that Steam hasn't already turned into a cesspool of cheap-ass amateur crap like the Apple App Store has.
With whom are you communicating?
However, I have plenty of resumes,
FTFY. HTH.
I don't know about the original poster, but I use the EditHtml extension. AFAIK there's no way to edit the message source without some sort of add-on.
Funny how you never see anyone who has a credible chance of winning running on a platform of election reform...
Let me start by saying that I'm not particularly concerned about the privacy issues regarding smart meters. But I do understand why people are.
1. It's not enough that the utility doesn't store high-resolution data. The issue is that they can. Right now it's not worth doing. But 10 years from now, when petabyte drives are sold as loss-leaders at Best Buy, who's to say that it's no longer worth storing whatever random scraps of information? It may in fact be cheaper to simply store everything than it is to figure out how to filter it.
2. Just because the utility doesn't store everything for everybody, they have the ability to store everything from a particular meter. That makes them a nice easy target for law enforcement officers. Since warrants for data collection seem to be entirely optional, it's not hard to imagine periodic data collection expeditions as police scan logs for particular suspects of a crime. Or just plain fishing, looking for any suspicious usage patterns.
3. And because the utility can collect the high-res data, and because law enforcement finds it so convenient, how long until some bright "tough on crime" congressman gets a bug up his butt about making such collection mandatory? With a data feed going directly to the FBI? What, you want the terrorists to win or something?
4. And lets not forget about burglars and anyone else wanting to break into a house getting access to the data. It's a treasure trove of information about who's home, when. But the data's encrypted, right? Sure it is. And I'll bet there's some sort of sideband attack that may not expose the raw data but will expose enough to be useful to a bad guy.
5. And even if they can't directly crack the encryption between the meter and the utility, what about that spiffy Web 2.0 front end (with free iPhone and Android apps!) that lets the customer track his usage? Who needs to break the low-level stuff when you can craft an SQL injection attack that returns the entire DB, sorted and collated any way you want?
I think these are problems that need to be addressed. Personally I expect that the benefits outweigh the risks, but I can see how reasonable people would disagree with that assessment.
Film at 11. I'll post a torrent.
Really? Holy shit!
Why is the teacher coddling them like that? Make them pick up their own damn hot dog!
That's because they didn't have you to help them design it! Remember, the most important office in Space Command is YOU!
That's pretty much it. Porn sites stand out pretty clearly on the log summary. Sort by bytes transferred. Actual porn site visits will have a lot of traffic, incidental visits (ie., a banner ad that slipped past AdBlock) will only have a little.
This technique allows you to know when they're browsing. It actually blocks very little, but they know that you'll know where they went. Yeah, some crap will unintentionally slip through. You can't help that, and if you're that allergic to boobies maybe you shouldn't let the kids browse by themselves anyway. If they've gone out of their way to find stuff you can talk to them about it. "Son, what's this gigabyte transferred from 'hentai-babes.com'?" If possible, get their mom to talk to them. There's nothing a teenage boy likes more than explaining his porn tastes to his mom.
There's a side benefit in that it'll help teach your kids networking. Nothing gets them to learn faster than standing between them and their porn! I'm just sad that my kid hasn't figured out how to spoof his MAC address yet. Or if he has, he's also figured out how to keep from showing up as an unknown device in the DHCP logs. And if that's the case, he's earned his dirty pictures.
Agreed. Very good books, which I also read in my pre-teen years. 8 may be a little young, but it's worth a shot. I've been watching Falling Skies with my 14yo and it strikes me that Falling Skies could almost be a prequel to the Tripods. The details don't quite line up, but the alien invasion and subjugation of the human race with mind control devices are similar enough. (Yes, I know about When The Tripods Came, though I haven't read it.)
Also try Terry Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind. It's kind of a Last Starfighter story. His other young adult fiction might also be good, but I haven't read any of it.
I haven't read any of them, but the Jupiter series is a conscious effort by Charles Sheffield to produce modern SF stories reminiscent of Heinlein's juvenile novels.
Are the Danny Dunn books still around? Those had a bunch of science and SF themes, though they probably seem very dated by now. As my wife points out, any books supposedly set in the present day need to acknowledge the existence of cell phones or they'll look outdated. If the characters are in a tough situation that revolves around them being isolated, you need to explain why they can't just text each other or call 911.
I'm still boggling at the idea of a Brit critiquing food. You are aware that there are preparation methods apart from boiling, right?
Sure, you can turn off secure boot. Go into setup, uncheck the "Enable Secure Boot" option. Click past the dialog that reads, "WARNING! Turning off Secure Boot will make you vulnerable to hackers! Do you really want to let the cyberterrorists win (y/N)?" Or similar text which will be equally scary to non-technical users.
OS vendors other than MS will have three choices: Get their key included by the all the motherboard manufacturers; pay MS to sign their bootloader; or subject their users to the Scary Dialog of Cyberdoom. Everyone here understands that it's just FUD. But will the average computer user understand it? It's creating a sense of "Microsoft == Security" and "Others == Trousers Around Your Ankles". Ooh, better stick with Windows or the cyberboogieman will get you!
And on top of it all, I give it less than a year before MS's master private key is leaked, stolen, or otherwise hacked to render "Secure Boot" about as secure and useful as WEP or CSS (the DVD kind, not the Web 2.0 kind).
That wasn't hate, that was pity. Most people eventually grow out of the sophomore bullshit phase, but you're special.
That, and because the wheelies the rockets do when they rev them up and then pop the clutch are just friggin' awesome!
Where's the control for this experiment? How about posting a similar but completely factual article? I bet you'd get the same results -- no response on Wikipedia, and a dogpile of people on Reddit calling "FAKE!"
Yup. If there was a group of people dead-set on destroying the United States, that's where they should start. Bomb the security checkpoints. By definition they're insecure areas, and they have lots of people milling about. Bomb an airport security queue and you'll stop all air travel for a couple days. Bomb two or three simultaneously and you'll stop air travel for weeks. Randomly bomb other queues, such as train stations or sporting events or concerts, and you'll panic the the nation so badly we'll collectively shit ourselves to death. You win! It'd be easy to do, especially if you have a few people willing to martyr themselves for the cause.
Now, this hasn't happened yet in over a decade since the WTC attacks. What does that tell you about the existence of the bogeyman that we're being told is lurking just around the corner?
FTFY. This is really the issue at hand. It's not that the people proposing the law don't want to see porn, it's that they don't want anyone else seeing it. Err, I mean, they don't want the children to see it. Adults should have the right to, of course. Just opt-in by putting your name on this list titled "Probable Sex Offenders" and you can look at your porn again. You perv.