That's why I metamoderate every time I am offered it on Slashdot. I often find posts that are improperly modded down (i.e., an "Offtopic" on an on-topic post about a heated subject), and have metamodded appropriately. I almost never moderate, but I'm fanatical about metamoderating, because abusive moderation happens all the time.
I stopped moderating and meta-moderating because abusive meta-moderation happens quite frequently as well. There is no penalty whatsoever for abusive meta-moderation... I'm not sure how they should handle it, but if I get meta-moderated unfairly by a right-wing wacko because I moderated insightful some comment about how the Bush administration is abusing the constitution, that's just extremely unfair.
Overall, though, the moderation system works. I just choose not to participate in it because I don't want to be unfairly meta-moderated.
The 2006 case was an attempt by the DoJ to subpoena all search records from all major search engines in order to bolster support for government regulation of pornography. Everyone else but Google complied and turned over records. Google did not.
True, but the fact that the person they were working with at the DOJ is now a Google employee seems to indicate that there might have been some hush-hush deal made "These aren't the search records you're looking for... oh, and by the way, Google is hiring (wink, wink) and we need someone like you; you should submit a resume."
I think it works that way in the USA too, but don't quote me on that.
Nah, in the US you just appeal the court decision until a new administration is elected that is pro-Business and wink-wink, nudge-nudge you get let off with nothing but a slap on the wrist.
If you notice, this guy's company sells Oracle consulting services. If you're (insert name of large multi-national bank here) and you just hired a $200 an hour Oracle DBA consultant, don't you think you might be a little concerned if he shows up in black jeans, a faded concert T-shirt, having a beard and hair down to the middle of his back?
Now, on the other hand, if you're working for a casual tech-company as an Oracle DBA, everyone in the office knows you, and everyone else dresses casually, the jeans, t-shirt, long hair and beard might be just fine.
As a consultant, you have to project a better image because you're not just projecting an image for yourself; you're representing the consulting company that placed you. Who knows, they might want to bill 10,000 hours of consulting time this year with (insert name of large multi-national bank here), but they only get to bill 40 hours because they let you go after a week and hired a different company because you weren't dressed professionally enough.
Another thing to consider is that it's much better to be overdressed, than to be underdressed. Usually nobody will say "you look too nice," but they will always talk about you behind your back if your dress code is too sloppy.
Instead, Google should use something akin MENSA tests. This would deter the bots and make the customers feel really good about themselves. And this feeling, my friend, can't be bought cheaply.
The only problem is that people intelligent enough to pass the MENSA test are pretty much guaranteed to never click on an AdSense ad, thereby destroying their business model.
What Gmail really needs to make maximum profit is to appeal to the average MySpace user... Captchas should be pictures of "boobies" or "thongs" and make the user click "Which one is this, boobies or thongs?" That way they can pretty much guarantee that every Gmail user will generate maximum ad revenue by clicking on all of the stupid "Get your free smileys here!" ads that appear on the screen...
I'm certain stock photo rights do not amount anywhere close to $19,462. He only got that much because he had to go through all the BS to get what he deserved in the first place, and I'm sure he's more than satisfied with the award given. That "get more money and stick 'em with attorney fees" thing sounds downright malicious to me. Isn't it enough that the company was held liable for their use of the photograph in the first place? Nope, we gotta teach those bastards a lesson.
My question for the submitter/photographer is this: How much of your own personal time and energy did you spend on this case? How valuable is your personal time and energy?
If you're like most reasonable people, you need to be compensated for that. I've been following the story on your website and you've been fighting these guys for months, if not years. A good attorney would have gotten you paid for all of the personal time and energy you spent, which would be closer to $100,000 than $20,000.
No, the "get more money and stick 'em with attorney fees" thing is not malicious. What's malicious is stealing an honest man's hard work and taking years off of his life while he tries to fight for the chance to get paid for his work. If you steal my work, I want my attorney to make damn sure you not only pay me for it, but you pay for whatever inconvenience and hardship you caused by making me force you to pay.
The only case where the administration could not conduct a warantless tap is if there was an entirely new terrorist organization to emerge in the next twelve months. And they could still get a wiretap, they just have to get a warrant.
That's still BS, because even if a new terrorist organization emerged, they could still use existing FISA to begin wiretaps immediately, and just get a retroactive FISA warrant within 72 hours. This whole fiasco is a recursive nest of lies, deceit, and illegality.
Now call me when we have the bandwidth to stream HD, and we're not paying a premium for discs and when we all have large screen hi def tvs that actually can utilized the enhanced resolution.
The AppleTV is calling... are you there? I watched a different HiDef (720p) rental every day last week with Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. I was able to rent from the comfort of my couch and watch the movie within a few minutes on my big screen HDTV.
Also like the below poster mentions, linux is the weapon of choice amongst the geek elite.
I guess I'm not really talking about the geek elite, but more about the warez/gamer/hacker community, which is more likely to be technically savvy, but not savvy enough to grok Linux. They may have tried Linux a few times, but were frustrated by it's difficulty. Personally I'm a Linux Sysadmin and a UNIX admin before that, so I have no problem grokking *nix, but I'm thinking of the legions of MCSE Windows Admins, local computer shop repair guys, etc, that outnumber me by about 100 to 1. I work with guys like that all the time, and lately I'm hearing from them "I want to buy an iPhone" and "do you think you could help me pick the parts for my hackintosh?"
They are increasingly becoming disenchanted by Vista and Microsoft in general, and Apple makes a better OS. Also, while I've used Ubuntu and Kubuntu, I still think OS X is a much better and more polished version of UNIX. Apple has really locked down how to make a commercial desktop OS that is solid and does pretty much anything you could want a desktop to do.
I remember in the early 90s drooling over those 4-way 4GB Sun workstations and wishing I could have one at home. Now I have something better: A quad-core 3 ghz hackintosh with 4GB of RAM... The power of a UNIX workstation for less than $1k... If Apple is smart they will silently encourage piracy of OS X, which will drive greater Mac sales and adoption by word of mouth.
What we need is for them to work with open standards so we can integrate a few Windows boxes into mixed environment without every other system having to create hack jobs to speak to them. Just because they make API's available just means the workarounds to integrate their world with Linux/Unix/whatever can be supported and the risk of failure is reduced. I'm tired of making compromises to have a heterogeneous environment.
I give it 2-3 years max before this happens. The reason is that Microsoft is losing the server market to better *nix competitors. Server 2008 will be a resounding failure. No business in their right mind is going to run a server operating system with a remote kill switch (WGA - Windows Genuin Dis advantage), which has already been accidentally triggered for thousands of Vista users.
Microsoft was able to keep their monopoly intact by promoting piracy of their own software (in the past) and getting informed IT users to "drink the kool-aid" with free downloads. Now that they've implemented draconian DRM and activation which is difficult to work around, they're losing their biggest market and mind-share: the enthusiasts that actually used to like Windows.
What I see happening now is that all of the people that were playing with Windows NT at home and building home networks and setting up domains back in the late 90's early 2000's are building Hackintoshes and using Leopard. They see how well Leopard performs on the exact same hardware compared to Vista and it is night and day.
I have a Leopard box at home on a quad-core Hackintosh and it is remarkably stable. I get full access to all 4GB of my RAM (no 32-bit limitations that only give me 3GB, and no signed driver BS like I get with 64-bit Vista). I have uptimes that measure in weeks instead of hours or days, and everything just fucking works.
Mark my words, Apple will be the next Microsoft. Whatever the "cool kids" are playing with on their hacked, modded, and customized home PCs will be the operating system of the future in business. It always goes in that cycle. First you get the technology elite to adopt your product, then they eventually tell enough business types (PHBs) how good it is, and enough of the PHBs will eventually listen and start adoption on a corporate level.
While I can't really opine on the EU's regulations themselves for various reasons, I've been talking with people who are directly affected by them, and the amount of work we're doing to accommodate the EU is astronomical. About a third of our developer workforce has basically lost 6 months or more of time to write documentation on things that range from current file formats, to things that aren't even current technologies anymore.
Cry me a fucking river. The fact that your executive management has abused the industry for decades and made billions by holding back the technological progress being made in other areas of the computer industry with monopoly tactics of format lock-in, collusion with OEM partners, and outright racketeering does not make me sympathetic at all.
Microsoft should have provided the documentation years ago, when it was first ordered to by the DoJ and the EU. Now that they're finally getting their ass kicked by regulators that can't be bribed or bought out they are finally creating documentation, but only after kicking and screaming like a 2 year old throwing a temper tantrum.
You don't like it? Tough, find a job as a developer at any number of other companies that don't have unethical business practices. I hear Google is hiring.
Also, if anyone thinks our military cant take out a working satellite, I want some of what that person is smoking. Our military has stuff most of us wont hear about publicly for another 10-20 years.
The point Kos was trying to make is very valid. This was an anti-missile missile. There have been several unsuccessful tests of the missile defense system.
If a real nuclear war was started, do you think our enemies would be kind enough to wait until the weather allowed the sun to heat the missile so that our infrared guidance system could better track it? LOL
Not to defend the military but could this have been simply a matter of selecting the right conditions for observing the attack? One of the B-29's with the a-bombs, I forget which one, aborted from the original city because of bad weather. Since nuclear weapons are not pinpoint weapons and they could have dropped through cloud cover, I'm assuming it was for the benefit of the observation planes. If I were testing a torpedo against a target ship, I'd want a calm and sunny day, not that atmospheric conditions would affect a fish in th water, but because I want a good view of the exploding target. It wouldn't look as impressive through rain squalls, even though the torpedo would still work just fine.
You bring up a really good point, but come on, it was funny!;-)
This format war won't have a winner. Both sides are betting on the future of the shiny 5" plastic disc. Music CDs have no future in the era of iTunes and ubiquitous iPods. Movie discs will share the same fate a few years later as bandwidth and storage technology fulfill the requirements. Tivo and OnDemand have already gotten people accustomed to recording TV shows and renting movies without a disc.
I totally agree with you there. After having used an AppleTV with the Take 2 software loaded on it for the last couple of weeks, I won't be buying any shiny 5" disk players anytime soon. The future is digital delivery of movies.
You can still buy Laserdisc players very cheaply on eBay. In a few years, you will probably be able to pick up HD-DVD players and a collection of films very cheaply. If you watch films in a home cinema type setup, and don't care about laptop compatibility, HD-DVD will be a good way of getting a large collection of HD movies in the near future. I'm still tempted to pick up a Laserdisc player and a load of movies on eBay - collections tend to go for under $2 per disc, and there's something fun about those huge optical frisbees.
Laserdisc is a bad example to use because it was a superior quality format, compared to both VHS and Betamax of the time. The price was too high for mass adoption, however, so it never really took off, but it was and still probably is used pretty heavily in videophile home theatres and such.
If you RTFA you would know that the times can be anywhere from seconds to minutes, but that if you rapidly cool them with an inverted air duster, you can keep the info retained in the chips for 10 minutes or so. I you use some liquid nitrogen, even longer. Requires that you "cut" power to the computer. So I guess that means for a laptop, pulling the battery first, then pulling the plug, spraying the chips with liquid cool, then plopping them into another machine and booting to an evil OS that will read the contents of the memory.
What you just described sounds like a really cool idea for a high-tech spy movie... Anyone want to create Sneakers 2?
Mac OS X has secure virtual memory. I don't know if anyone has tested this to see if it actually provides any security but on my system it's a single checkbox "Use secure virtual memory" in the security preference pane.
I believe that's only for swap files, not for physical memory. Swap files on disk tend to be a greater concern because the memory doesn't decay after a few minutes, but can be read for quite some time, even if the file is deleted.
They're pulling the service pack because one of the pre-requisite patches you need to install before the service pack can even be applied is causing hard disk errors and requiring re-formats, although you can use the Vista CD to repair those errors, unless you paid for the downloadable version which doesn't come on a CD, and it only affects a minority of users in "unique circumstances" to begin with.
What about all of the people that buy brand new computers with Vista and don't even get an OS install disk? This is standard operating procedure for all large OEMs now. No disks shipped with the computer at all... You have the option of creating a "restore disk" using your own blank DVD or CD media. The problem is, a restore disk will only restore your system back to the state it was installed in, with all of the crapware, shovelware, demoware, and spyware that ships on a modern computer...
I think the manufacturers like this approach better because there is no easy way to reformat the computer and reinstall just Windows, without all of the shovelware. The problem is that if your system gets hosed, you can only go back to the crap shovelware configuration they give you out of the box, and then you end up spending 4-8 hours just uninstalling all of the shovelware. I know this because I literally spent 4 hours one night uninstalling all of the crap shovelware that came on my girlfriend's Sony Vaio "Vista Home Premium" laptop. No OS install disk, just a little piece of paper saying "We recommend that you make a system restore disk as soon as possible."
With this kind of abuse, it's no wonder people are switching to Macs left and right. Between Microsoft and the OEMs like Dell, Sony, HP, Gateway, and IBM, the customers are being bent over and gang-banged in every orifice.
It wasn't an anti-satellite missile. It was an anti-missile missile, and it only worked because of the decayed orbit of the satellite. This missile would not be able to touch a "working" satellite.
I read a really funny line on DailyKos yesterday about this:
The US Navy announced that due to bad weather, it will postpone the attempt to shoot down the impaired satellite until tomorrow at the earliest. Our zillion dollar "star wars" technology is clearly capable of stopping incoming missiles so long as: they come one at a time, are the size of a school bus, travel in orbits that have been calculated for months, don't deploy any decoys, and the weather is clear.
In other news, Squiggleslash's HD DVD player still works. It still plays all my HD DVD media. The movies still look great. And, boy, am I looking forward to the blow-out sales over the next few months.
Wow, you must be kinda bitter that you picked the wrong choice in a format war. Seriously, why even consider buying HD-DVD movies, unless they are absolutely free right now? Even if it's only $5, you're still buying an obsolete format that you won't even be able to find a player for in a few years.
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Overall, though, the moderation system works. I just choose not to participate in it because I don't want to be unfairly meta-moderated.
Where the hell is my Quagmire spinoff?
Giggity giggity goo! Alllright!
I agree 100% about the anonymity. The thought of wanting to be anonymous while paying tuition sounded kinda funny to me...
Now, on the other hand, if you're working for a casual tech-company as an Oracle DBA, everyone in the office knows you, and everyone else dresses casually, the jeans, t-shirt, long hair and beard might be just fine.
As a consultant, you have to project a better image because you're not just projecting an image for yourself; you're representing the consulting company that placed you. Who knows, they might want to bill 10,000 hours of consulting time this year with (insert name of large multi-national bank here), but they only get to bill 40 hours because they let you go after a week and hired a different company because you weren't dressed professionally enough.
Another thing to consider is that it's much better to be overdressed, than to be underdressed. Usually nobody will say "you look too nice," but they will always talk about you behind your back if your dress code is too sloppy.
What Gmail really needs to make maximum profit is to appeal to the average MySpace user... Captchas should be pictures of "boobies" or "thongs" and make the user click "Which one is this, boobies or thongs?" That way they can pretty much guarantee that every Gmail user will generate maximum ad revenue by clicking on all of the stupid "Get your free smileys here!" ads that appear on the screen...
OMG I think I'm going to be sick...
If you're like most reasonable people, you need to be compensated for that. I've been following the story on your website and you've been fighting these guys for months, if not years. A good attorney would have gotten you paid for all of the personal time and energy you spent, which would be closer to $100,000 than $20,000.
No, the "get more money and stick 'em with attorney fees" thing is not malicious. What's malicious is stealing an honest man's hard work and taking years off of his life while he tries to fight for the chance to get paid for his work. If you steal my work, I want my attorney to make damn sure you not only pay me for it, but you pay for whatever inconvenience and hardship you caused by making me force you to pay.
Shiny 5" discs are so 1999...
They are increasingly becoming disenchanted by Vista and Microsoft in general, and Apple makes a better OS. Also, while I've used Ubuntu and Kubuntu, I still think OS X is a much better and more polished version of UNIX. Apple has really locked down how to make a commercial desktop OS that is solid and does pretty much anything you could want a desktop to do.
I remember in the early 90s drooling over those 4-way 4GB Sun workstations and wishing I could have one at home. Now I have something better: A quad-core 3 ghz hackintosh with 4GB of RAM... The power of a UNIX workstation for less than $1k... If Apple is smart they will silently encourage piracy of OS X, which will drive greater Mac sales and adoption by word of mouth.
Microsoft was able to keep their monopoly intact by promoting piracy of their own software (in the past) and getting informed IT users to "drink the kool-aid" with free downloads. Now that they've implemented draconian DRM and activation which is difficult to work around, they're losing their biggest market and mind-share: the enthusiasts that actually used to like Windows.
What I see happening now is that all of the people that were playing with Windows NT at home and building home networks and setting up domains back in the late 90's early 2000's are building Hackintoshes and using Leopard. They see how well Leopard performs on the exact same hardware compared to Vista and it is night and day.
I have a Leopard box at home on a quad-core Hackintosh and it is remarkably stable. I get full access to all 4GB of my RAM (no 32-bit limitations that only give me 3GB, and no signed driver BS like I get with 64-bit Vista). I have uptimes that measure in weeks instead of hours or days, and everything just fucking works.
Mark my words, Apple will be the next Microsoft. Whatever the "cool kids" are playing with on their hacked, modded, and customized home PCs will be the operating system of the future in business. It always goes in that cycle. First you get the technology elite to adopt your product, then they eventually tell enough business types (PHBs) how good it is, and enough of the PHBs will eventually listen and start adoption on a corporate level.
Microsoft should have provided the documentation years ago, when it was first ordered to by the DoJ and the EU. Now that they're finally getting their ass kicked by regulators that can't be bribed or bought out they are finally creating documentation, but only after kicking and screaming like a 2 year old throwing a temper tantrum.
You don't like it? Tough, find a job as a developer at any number of other companies that don't have unethical business practices. I hear Google is hiring.
If a real nuclear war was started, do you think our enemies would be kind enough to wait until the weather allowed the sun to heat the missile so that our infrared guidance system could better track it? LOL
I think the manufacturers like this approach better because there is no easy way to reformat the computer and reinstall just Windows, without all of the shovelware. The problem is that if your system gets hosed, you can only go back to the crap shovelware configuration they give you out of the box, and then you end up spending 4-8 hours just uninstalling all of the shovelware. I know this because I literally spent 4 hours one night uninstalling all of the crap shovelware that came on my girlfriend's Sony Vaio "Vista Home Premium" laptop. No OS install disk, just a little piece of paper saying "We recommend that you make a system restore disk as soon as possible."
With this kind of abuse, it's no wonder people are switching to Macs left and right. Between Microsoft and the OEMs like Dell, Sony, HP, Gateway, and IBM, the customers are being bent over and gang-banged in every orifice.
The US Navy announced that due to bad weather, it will postpone the attempt to shoot down the impaired satellite until tomorrow at the earliest. Our zillion dollar "star wars" technology is clearly capable of stopping incoming missiles so long as: they come one at a time, are the size of a school bus, travel in orbits that have been calculated for months, don't deploy any decoys, and the weather is clear.