Even better, just go to NASA's site: www.nasa.gov, search LCROSS, and the first hit you get is a link to a page which gave you the option to dial into a telecon discussing the LCROSS results:
So to the parent bitching about non-free, tax funded results, perhaps you should just try finding the information for yourself if you are really all that interested. Rather than complaining because Slashdot, a news aggregator, linked you to the wrong source.
Well look at it from a testing point of view. No community can saturate an internet line quite as quickly or effectively as a bunch of horned up, tech-savvy college kids spending hours a day torrenting, playing facebook games, and streaming music, video, and porn 24/7.
If you don't mind my asking, are you in the U.S? And if so, what carrier are you using the N900 on? From what I've read, it appears that T-mobile is the typical carrier for n900 users in the U.S., but I have yet to see any particular plan on T-mobile stand out as a cheap, effective data + text solution.
They point out that Tesla has to work to attract the kind of specialized engineers they need to move out there.
And even that is probably a bit fluffed up in terms of being a metric. Tesla works hard to attract the best and the brightest because they want the absolute cream of the crop for their engineers. SpaceX is just as picky with it's engineers. These companies don't shop worldwide because there are no engineers in California. They shop worldwide because they want the smartest sons of bitches money can buy working for them
If quantity of engineers (non software/electrical) is a problem for any start ups in California, they aren't looking hard enough. California has some of the best mechanical, systems, aerospace, and materials engineering schools on the planet: Cal Poly- San Luis Obispo, UC Davis, UCLA, UC Berkley, Stanford, UC Irvine, Cal Poly - Pomona, Cal Tech, and even SJSU all have wonderful engineering programs that are as diverse as they are rigorous. Each one of those schools still turns out a few hundred (if not thousand) new, talented engineers a year. Stack on top of the the fact that Orange County and the Silicon Valley also have very developed aerospace and robotics industries chugging along inside their borders, and you will start to realize just what a diverse pool of engineering and design talent (both electrical and mechanical) exists in California. Quite frankly, if Musk or anyone else is having trouble finding engineering talent in California in any discipline, they aren't looking hard enough.
It seems to me that the reason many pop idol stars have such a huge following is because folk love to feed off of the drama and scandals that are their lives. If you take away the disappointment, crushing defeat, personality flaws, attempts to remake themselves, and so on, then pop stars become pretty boring pretty fast. Honestly, who gets the most press? The popular stars that fade away gracefully (Christina Aguilera), or the ones that get involved in a never ending cycle of shattered dreams/careers and 'successful' remakings of their images (Brittany Spears)?
A virtual idol won't need to eat or sleep, they can never be involved in a scandals, they don't do drugs, they'll do exactly what you tell them, they don't get royalties and they never retire.
So, they'll never be involved in any of the stuff that makes real popstars so popular?
Or, for that matter, if you own a mailbox. The bright side of all the campaigning, of course, is that Jerry Brown's fliers are made of a type of tag board that is great for creating acoustic cones (you're damn right I'm inserting a shameless self-plug, Cali politicians aren't the only ones that can campaign!) and Meg Whitman's letters are great at cleaning up spilled juice off of a hardwood floor!
See, dude, this is just a lie, which makes me think the rest of your post might be as well
Well no, it's not an outright lie. And the fact that you would be so bold as to claim that an experience I had, that you were not present for, is a lie just goes to show how assuming you are. You say iTunes has always had the capability to play mp3's and.wav files? Okay, fine, I will buy that that's true. So what you could have taken from my post is that, for whatever reason, I was simply too incompetent or misinformed at the time to get it working right. Instead you chose to attack me and call me a liar. Fine, be belligerent. I don't really care.
What I know happened is that when I clicked on mp3 songs, and selected "Open with iTunes," they wouldn't play. I could get them to play as wav files however. Why that was, I don't know. I also know that when I had iTunes open, and tried to drag-drop mp3's onto it to get them to play, they wouldn't play. Maybe my installation of the program was borked. I really couldn't tell you. Like I said, it was years ago (though apparently I over-estimated the number of years).
So if you want to insist that it was a developed case of PEBCAK I'll give that that is a substantial possibility. The point that I tried to underscore in my second post, however, was that there were existing media players at the time that were not difficult for me to use. At all. For all the heralding of Apple being easy-to-use today (and perhaps they are) I certainly did not get that impression back then. So it made me biased. I am not denying that I am biased. I was simply expressing my distaste for Apple products, one of the reasons for it, and how I would be sad to see a product I value become the property of a company I, personally, refuse to do business with.
If you've had a better experience, good for you. But there is no reason for you to call me a liar or get your knickers in a twist over something as silly as my personal anecdote. For the record, I often recommend buying a mac to my less tech-savvy friends because I understand that, these days, user-friendliness is the reason they are so popular. I simply don't choose to utilize their products myself.
How much data have they sent us that we can use to build a replacement that does a better job? Not much.
If you honestly believe this you don't know shit about spacecraft engineering. The data collected from the Voyager spacecraft, and even the Pioneer spacecraft while they were operating through their primary mission phases was invaluable for building upon. We have improved RTG output, efficiency, and mass savings based on what we learned from voyager. We have developed better methods of deep space communication due to our practice of continuing communication with all of those spacecraft. We have learned a lot more about orbital dynamics and have come up with some very clever fuel saving maneuvers that are utilized by probes made today thanks to the telemetry data sent back by Voyager and Pioneer.
In fact, every single deep space probe that we have developed since those spacecraft were launched (Cassini, New Horizons, the upcoming Juno, etc. etc.) used Voyager as a case study while developing their design and mission profile. Engineering, especially in the aerospace field, is an art that involves a lot of, "Okay, what have we done already that was successful and is similar?" The technology demonstrated and flown on the Voyager spacecraft gave us a foundation to build more complex, better probes today. To say otherwise is downright stupid and ignorant. And it is a dead give away that you don't know what the hell you are talking about. That's not to say that building some different probe wouldn't have also benefited us, it would have. But to say that the data collected from Voyager yielded very little useful information that could be utilized in later missions is perhaps the single wrongest statement I have ever seen on Slashdot.
Today Voyager is far enough out that much of the data being collected is teaching us lessons in what it takes for a spacecraft to survive that far away from the sun. That data will be referenced by an engineering team next time a mission to fly outside of the Sun's sphere of influence is started. I guarantee you, as an aerospace engineer myself, that the data being collected from Voyager right now will be useful and valuable in the future.
Yes, I do realize that and, eight years ago, when I first tried iTunes, I did just that. My media collection was still borked and I had to clean i up manually. Then I tried getting iTunes to play anything other than it's own proprietary format and, back then, it wouldn't. I had to download special converter programs just so I could get native iTunes music into mp3 format. It didn't help that iTunes, back then, was clunky and slow. Many of the options to customize it were a pain in the ass to find. All in all, it was a much poorer experience than windows media player and I freakin' hated that stupid program as well. So I stopped using both.
My solution was to download WinAmp which, at the time, was small, lightweight, simple, and compatible with any media I could throw at it. When I switched to Linux, I started using Xine and/or Rhytmbox. Now on windows I use FooBar. The moral of the story wasn't that iTunes had one crappy feature that was too complicated for me to figure out. The moral of the story was that I had to fight it to get it to do stuff that WinAmp and other media players could just do simpler and easier. Mind you, I am writing about when I tried it back in high school which was almost a decade ago. iTunes was a very different program then than what it is now. But what remained consistent over the years was Apple's attitude and theme of, " Let us control your data and hardware and we will protect you from anything that might scare you or force you to think." Hence, I dropped the company and, since I haven't seen that mantra change at all as they grew popular, I have had absolutely no incentive to try any of their products out again.
I have my reasons for my decisions. And they do go far beyond one simple "feature" misunderstanding with one application on my part.
It would really suck if a merger or buyout like this actually went through. I use Facebook because it is, currently, the most effective way to keep in contact with 90% of the people that I don't have the time to call on the phone and check up with. It's also a great platform for starting open conversations where my friends from various social circles can interact. To me, it provides a valuable service.
Unfortunately, if Apple bought Facebook I think I would have to close down my profile and find some other platform to work on. I might actually start maintaining my Myspace or something, I don't know. I've been boycotting Apple, personally, since high school after mucking about with iTunes a few times. After realizing how locked down Apple's products are, as well as how belligerent they can be to the rest of your computing environment (honestly, I have never known any other media player program to rearrange and duplicate 70% of my music collection), I decided to not use any of Apple's products from then on.
That said, I wonder if a move like this would cause a lot of people to dump Facebook. I know I am not the only Apple hater within my group of friends, and I suspect the number of folks that might abandon Facebook would be significantly large. This would be doubly so if some other, better social network started coming up around the same time (Some Google product maybe? Or possibly even Apple-seed?)
Classifying the Zen of Apple as way better is merely a subjective judgment. Personally, I prefer to hack everything together because I learn more and can troubleshoot the system myself when it breaks down I call that the "Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance." There is even a book about it.
Today? No one even cooks. Everyone orders Domino's or goes to Micky D's. Support what is left of culture
That's nonsense, or, at least, anecdotal. Here on the central coast of California, if it's a nice evening out, you can jog through my community and, depending on which part of town you are in, you can smell the rednecks BBQing hamburgers, the Mexicans BBQing carne asada, or all of the suburbanites cooking their latest Stoffer's stir fry packet. Plenty of people cook. There is plenty of culture left in America. I don't know why the area you grew up in is changing, but out here on the West Coast, in the smaller towns and cities, that is very much not the case.
Gene Simmons has gone as far as endorsing prison rape for file sharers. That's, simply put, psychotic.
No, that's actually just heavy metal talk. As someone who has been involved in the punk, metal, and hardcore scenes for quite awhile, I can attest to that fact that metal-heads talk in these kinds of extremes pretty regularly. Saying the most outlandish, controversial, politically incorrect thing that comes to mind is pretty much par for the course of anyone speaking in the metal, punk, or hardcore languages. Hell...the Misfits wrote a song about raping mothers and killing babies....soooo, yeah, prison rape was actually a pretty tame threat coming from a band like Kiss.
Maybe he didn't want to bother with implementing interoperability because he had other aspects of the website he wanted to focus on. I know that if I had a pet project going, and some outsider insisted that I should do X, Y, and Z because it is right and just makes sense, I might respectfully tell them to piss off because I would rather work on U, V, and W. It is my project after all, right?
It could be that he actually did have relatively earnest and true motivations when he started out, however, as he gained fame and money and power he began to value other things. It wouldn't be the first time that money turned a fairly decent fellow into a raging douche. Just because he makes asshole comments now, and acts like a spoiled blowhard, doesn't mean he had that same personality all along. As my dad used to say, "Money changes folk."
Hahahahahahaha! I really doubt that you have ever lived in a small town for very long. Either that or you lived there and spent so much time withdrawn from the other residents that you didn't really know what is going on.
Except that in that little town, you have to drive past my house to see my status. You have to spend a few hours BSing with locals to find out the gossip. It takes WORK to invade privacy.
While the first two sentences are correct, the last one is a false classification. In small towns, there is so little to do that none of the locals consider it work to sit around and BS the day away, or to cruise around town and see what everyone is up to. That's pretty much the common past time. It takes a lot more work for small town residents to come up with some grand, glorious adventure for the weekend because they actually have to coordinate it and round everyone up.
A rural town give privacy through difficutly to obtain and spread information and the difficulty in retaining said information with accuracy for long periods.
The first rule of living in a small town: "Never underestimate how fast Aunt Mae can call the other fives town gossips, one of which will inevitably be married to the mayor or the preacher." Also, accuracy of information is completely irrelevant when it comes to the ability of a small town to violate your privacy. If word gets out you're gay, you're fucked. Whether you're gay or not makes absolutely no difference to them.
Well not really. Supposing that there are civilian informants that are in danger due to the wikileaks stuff, as long as the U.S. military remains in Afghanistan, it can offer some bit of sanctuary to said civilian. If, however, the U.S. military pulls out, then those civilians are still in danger due to nothing more than the desire for vengeance. Whoever was fighting the U.S. military while it was there will just use the power vacancy as an excuse to do whatever the hell they want, including hunting down those that conspired with Americans.
Now, I want to make it clear that such an argument should never be used as a reason to keep the U.S. military in the middle east perpetually, but it's not quite as simple as, "Just leave and everything will get better."
Thank you for that post. It's always nice to see two sides of an argument even if one side is consistently modded up while another side is consistently modded down. You know slashdot mods, when this site claims to have the best moderation system on the internet, that's not a challenge to see if you can prove it false. Scrameustache has been asking for evidence, facts, and specific accounts of why someone might be disgruntled with Assange throughout this entire thread and Dhalka here has done his best to give him exactly that. It's an informative post with some interesting links and reads in it. It may not get everything 100% right (I don't know, I haven't read through all of the links yet), but it certainly does bring a bit of rational balance back to this thread.
In short, posts like this need to be modded up, not neglected because they don't align with a very common sentiment held on slashdot.
The fact that the U.S. Government keeps the public ignorant about so many things is not nearly as sad or as troubling or even as dangerous as the fact that the majority of the U.S. public wants to remain ignorant.
Which is precisely what makes me wonder if there is some subtler game afoot that we are not aware of. The sheer fact that all this Wikileaks stuff keeps getting brought up, and keeps successfully whipping the electorate into a finely divided idealistic mob makes me somewhat wary. I mean, honestly, with all the money, tech, and power at the hands of the U.S. government (with everything from the CIA to the DHS) do we really believe that it is not capable of silently and capably suppressing or putting down whatever threat Wikileaks poses to it?
Well I think his original point is that while you, or I, or he may not be willing to trust a company like Facebook, there are others that do. And while you, or I, or he would assume ourselves safe because we don't trust Facebook, we are not because those that do trust Facebook may post stuff about us. For instance, I am currently renting a condo that is part of an HOA. My fellow HOA members (especially the older ladies) have a very bad habit of gossiping about their neighbors and sticking their noses into other folks' business. That includes me and my business. I can't count how often I've caught my neighbor peeking over my fence for no apparent reason. Suppose one of these neighbors decides to start a blog about her neighbors, or about local community gossip, or, hell, just a blog or a Facebook account dedicated to our condo complex. Were that to happen, I would wager that there would be numerous details about myself, my at-home vs. time-away habits, and probably even some nasty rumors being posted to the internet about me. This would occur despite any efforts on my part to keep such information private. This is where the ethical issue becomes a real problem
It is easy to say, "If you don't want it known, don't post it on the internet." Okay, fine. Suppose I don't post my daily hours spent at home on the internet because I don't want less scrupulous folk to know when it is a good time to rob my house. Suppose my neighbor, however, in all of his or her infinite wisdom posts these details as part of her weekly gossip blog or whatever. Well then I am screwed by somebody else's actions, not my own. This is why the issue becomes more complicated than simply, "Don't post stuff to the internet!" I may not. That doesn't mean my friends, neighbors, or family also won't.
You can change your solution to, "Well, don't socialize with idiots that don't understand privacy issues, and move to a new location." But where does it end? Should I really have to uproot my life and burn some old bridges that I am rather fond of because some faceless companies and organizations out there don't have enough scruples to stay the hell out of my business, both online and offline? Honestly, the type of data scraping we are talking about here amounts to nothing short of talking actions were they performed in the meatspace. If someone followed me around for days on end to compile all the details of my life, recording conversations I have with what people, recording where I eat, recording who I visit and so on, I would have grounds to press a stalking charge against them. Can I do that with these data scraping companies online?
And to top it all off, these companies don't even get shit right 9/10 times. For instance, if you get charged with a traffic infraction, DMV gets notified of the infraction filing. If, then, you fight the charge and win in court, then you are supposed to have a clean record. The court should contact DMV to update your driving record to read as clean. If this company doesn't update it's database, however, it may well still list a traffic infraction on your master driving record. Next time your insurance premiums get addressed by your insurance company, they see a ticket (which you successfully beat) on your record (because the data company hasn't updated it's info yet), and now you have to fight your own damn insurance to get your rates back down and get your record clear. And if you think that's preposterous, it's not. I know for a fact that my insurance company, Geico, and my secondary insurance company, Progressive, both use the same data scraping services for their customer records. They do not contact DMV directly. And this has resulted in errors on my insurance record before that do not exist on my driving record.
So hopefully you can see, this isn't just about doofus's posting about their own bad habits online. This is becoming an epidemic of misinformation and rumor being used for official actions that affect folks lives on a regular basis.
Slashdot Mirror
Even better, just go to NASA's site: www.nasa.gov, search LCROSS, and the first hit you get is a link to a page which gave you the option to dial into a telecon discussing the LCROSS results:
So to the parent bitching about non-free, tax funded results, perhaps you should just try finding the information for yourself if you are really all that interested. Rather than complaining because Slashdot, a news aggregator, linked you to the wrong source.
Colleges just exist as a nice aggregator of folks who do this, thus leading to a higher concentration of porn streaming per capita.
Oh nonsense! Cows and corn seem to love living in the Central Valley! Oh, you mean desirable for humans? Yeah....that could be true then...
Well look at it from a testing point of view. No community can saturate an internet line quite as quickly or effectively as a bunch of horned up, tech-savvy college kids spending hours a day torrenting, playing facebook games, and streaming music, video, and porn 24/7.
If you don't mind my asking, are you in the U.S? And if so, what carrier are you using the N900 on? From what I've read, it appears that T-mobile is the typical carrier for n900 users in the U.S., but I have yet to see any particular plan on T-mobile stand out as a cheap, effective data + text solution.
They point out that Tesla has to work to attract the kind of specialized engineers they need to move out there.
And even that is probably a bit fluffed up in terms of being a metric. Tesla works hard to attract the best and the brightest because they want the absolute cream of the crop for their engineers. SpaceX is just as picky with it's engineers. These companies don't shop worldwide because there are no engineers in California. They shop worldwide because they want the smartest sons of bitches money can buy working for them
If quantity of engineers (non software/electrical) is a problem for any start ups in California, they aren't looking hard enough. California has some of the best mechanical, systems, aerospace, and materials engineering schools on the planet: Cal Poly- San Luis Obispo, UC Davis, UCLA, UC Berkley, Stanford, UC Irvine, Cal Poly - Pomona, Cal Tech, and even SJSU all have wonderful engineering programs that are as diverse as they are rigorous. Each one of those schools still turns out a few hundred (if not thousand) new, talented engineers a year. Stack on top of the the fact that Orange County and the Silicon Valley also have very developed aerospace and robotics industries chugging along inside their borders, and you will start to realize just what a diverse pool of engineering and design talent (both electrical and mechanical) exists in California. Quite frankly, if Musk or anyone else is having trouble finding engineering talent in California in any discipline, they aren't looking hard enough.
It seems to me that the reason many pop idol stars have such a huge following is because folk love to feed off of the drama and scandals that are their lives. If you take away the disappointment, crushing defeat, personality flaws, attempts to remake themselves, and so on, then pop stars become pretty boring pretty fast. Honestly, who gets the most press? The popular stars that fade away gracefully (Christina Aguilera), or the ones that get involved in a never ending cycle of shattered dreams/careers and 'successful' remakings of their images (Brittany Spears)?
A virtual idol won't need to eat or sleep, they can never be involved in a scandals, they don't do drugs, they'll do exactly what you tell them, they don't get royalties and they never retire.
So, they'll never be involved in any of the stuff that makes real popstars so popular?
Or, for that matter, if you own a mailbox. The bright side of all the campaigning, of course, is that Jerry Brown's fliers are made of a type of tag board that is great for creating acoustic cones (you're damn right I'm inserting a shameless self-plug, Cali politicians aren't the only ones that can campaign!) and Meg Whitman's letters are great at cleaning up spilled juice off of a hardwood floor!
See, dude, this is just a lie, which makes me think the rest of your post might be as well
Well no, it's not an outright lie. And the fact that you would be so bold as to claim that an experience I had, that you were not present for, is a lie just goes to show how assuming you are. You say iTunes has always had the capability to play mp3's and .wav files? Okay, fine, I will buy that that's true. So what you could have taken from my post is that, for whatever reason, I was simply too incompetent or misinformed at the time to get it working right. Instead you chose to attack me and call me a liar. Fine, be belligerent. I don't really care.
What I know happened is that when I clicked on mp3 songs, and selected "Open with iTunes," they wouldn't play. I could get them to play as wav files however. Why that was, I don't know. I also know that when I had iTunes open, and tried to drag-drop mp3's onto it to get them to play, they wouldn't play. Maybe my installation of the program was borked. I really couldn't tell you. Like I said, it was years ago (though apparently I over-estimated the number of years).
So if you want to insist that it was a developed case of PEBCAK I'll give that that is a substantial possibility. The point that I tried to underscore in my second post, however, was that there were existing media players at the time that were not difficult for me to use. At all. For all the heralding of Apple being easy-to-use today (and perhaps they are) I certainly did not get that impression back then. So it made me biased. I am not denying that I am biased. I was simply expressing my distaste for Apple products, one of the reasons for it, and how I would be sad to see a product I value become the property of a company I, personally, refuse to do business with.
If you've had a better experience, good for you. But there is no reason for you to call me a liar or get your knickers in a twist over something as silly as my personal anecdote. For the record, I often recommend buying a mac to my less tech-savvy friends because I understand that, these days, user-friendliness is the reason they are so popular. I simply don't choose to utilize their products myself.
How much data have they sent us that we can use to build a replacement that does a better job? Not much.
If you honestly believe this you don't know shit about spacecraft engineering. The data collected from the Voyager spacecraft, and even the Pioneer spacecraft while they were operating through their primary mission phases was invaluable for building upon. We have improved RTG output, efficiency, and mass savings based on what we learned from voyager. We have developed better methods of deep space communication due to our practice of continuing communication with all of those spacecraft. We have learned a lot more about orbital dynamics and have come up with some very clever fuel saving maneuvers that are utilized by probes made today thanks to the telemetry data sent back by Voyager and Pioneer.
In fact, every single deep space probe that we have developed since those spacecraft were launched (Cassini, New Horizons, the upcoming Juno, etc. etc.) used Voyager as a case study while developing their design and mission profile. Engineering, especially in the aerospace field, is an art that involves a lot of, "Okay, what have we done already that was successful and is similar?" The technology demonstrated and flown on the Voyager spacecraft gave us a foundation to build more complex, better probes today. To say otherwise is downright stupid and ignorant. And it is a dead give away that you don't know what the hell you are talking about. That's not to say that building some different probe wouldn't have also benefited us, it would have. But to say that the data collected from Voyager yielded very little useful information that could be utilized in later missions is perhaps the single wrongest statement I have ever seen on Slashdot.
Today Voyager is far enough out that much of the data being collected is teaching us lessons in what it takes for a spacecraft to survive that far away from the sun. That data will be referenced by an engineering team next time a mission to fly outside of the Sun's sphere of influence is started. I guarantee you, as an aerospace engineer myself, that the data being collected from Voyager right now will be useful and valuable in the future.
Yes, I do realize that and, eight years ago, when I first tried iTunes, I did just that. My media collection was still borked and I had to clean i up manually. Then I tried getting iTunes to play anything other than it's own proprietary format and, back then, it wouldn't. I had to download special converter programs just so I could get native iTunes music into mp3 format. It didn't help that iTunes, back then, was clunky and slow. Many of the options to customize it were a pain in the ass to find. All in all, it was a much poorer experience than windows media player and I freakin' hated that stupid program as well. So I stopped using both.
My solution was to download WinAmp which, at the time, was small, lightweight, simple, and compatible with any media I could throw at it. When I switched to Linux, I started using Xine and/or Rhytmbox. Now on windows I use FooBar. The moral of the story wasn't that iTunes had one crappy feature that was too complicated for me to figure out. The moral of the story was that I had to fight it to get it to do stuff that WinAmp and other media players could just do simpler and easier. Mind you, I am writing about when I tried it back in high school which was almost a decade ago. iTunes was a very different program then than what it is now. But what remained consistent over the years was Apple's attitude and theme of, " Let us control your data and hardware and we will protect you from anything that might scare you or force you to think." Hence, I dropped the company and, since I haven't seen that mantra change at all as they grew popular, I have had absolutely no incentive to try any of their products out again.
I have my reasons for my decisions. And they do go far beyond one simple "feature" misunderstanding with one application on my part.
It would really suck if a merger or buyout like this actually went through. I use Facebook because it is, currently, the most effective way to keep in contact with 90% of the people that I don't have the time to call on the phone and check up with. It's also a great platform for starting open conversations where my friends from various social circles can interact. To me, it provides a valuable service.
Unfortunately, if Apple bought Facebook I think I would have to close down my profile and find some other platform to work on. I might actually start maintaining my Myspace or something, I don't know. I've been boycotting Apple, personally, since high school after mucking about with iTunes a few times. After realizing how locked down Apple's products are, as well as how belligerent they can be to the rest of your computing environment (honestly, I have never known any other media player program to rearrange and duplicate 70% of my music collection), I decided to not use any of Apple's products from then on.
That said, I wonder if a move like this would cause a lot of people to dump Facebook. I know I am not the only Apple hater within my group of friends, and I suspect the number of folks that might abandon Facebook would be significantly large. This would be doubly so if some other, better social network started coming up around the same time (Some Google product maybe? Or possibly even Apple-seed?)
Classifying the Zen of Apple as way better is merely a subjective judgment. Personally, I prefer to hack everything together because I learn more and can troubleshoot the system myself when it breaks down I call that the "Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance." There is even a book about it.
Today? No one even cooks. Everyone orders Domino's or goes to Micky D's. Support what is left of culture
That's nonsense, or, at least, anecdotal. Here on the central coast of California, if it's a nice evening out, you can jog through my community and, depending on which part of town you are in, you can smell the rednecks BBQing hamburgers, the Mexicans BBQing carne asada, or all of the suburbanites cooking their latest Stoffer's stir fry packet. Plenty of people cook. There is plenty of culture left in America. I don't know why the area you grew up in is changing, but out here on the West Coast, in the smaller towns and cities, that is very much not the case.
Gene Simmons has gone as far as endorsing prison rape for file sharers. That's, simply put, psychotic.
No, that's actually just heavy metal talk. As someone who has been involved in the punk, metal, and hardcore scenes for quite awhile, I can attest to that fact that metal-heads talk in these kinds of extremes pretty regularly. Saying the most outlandish, controversial, politically incorrect thing that comes to mind is pretty much par for the course of anyone speaking in the metal, punk, or hardcore languages. Hell...the Misfits wrote a song about raping mothers and killing babies....soooo, yeah, prison rape was actually a pretty tame threat coming from a band like Kiss.
Maybe he didn't want to bother with implementing interoperability because he had other aspects of the website he wanted to focus on. I know that if I had a pet project going, and some outsider insisted that I should do X, Y, and Z because it is right and just makes sense, I might respectfully tell them to piss off because I would rather work on U, V, and W. It is my project after all, right?
It could be that he actually did have relatively earnest and true motivations when he started out, however, as he gained fame and money and power he began to value other things. It wouldn't be the first time that money turned a fairly decent fellow into a raging douche. Just because he makes asshole comments now, and acts like a spoiled blowhard, doesn't mean he had that same personality all along. As my dad used to say, "Money changes folk."
Except that in that little town, you have to drive past my house to see my status. You have to spend a few hours BSing with locals to find out the gossip. It takes WORK to invade privacy.
While the first two sentences are correct, the last one is a false classification. In small towns, there is so little to do that none of the locals consider it work to sit around and BS the day away, or to cruise around town and see what everyone is up to. That's pretty much the common past time. It takes a lot more work for small town residents to come up with some grand, glorious adventure for the weekend because they actually have to coordinate it and round everyone up.
A rural town give privacy through difficutly to obtain and spread information and the difficulty in retaining said information with accuracy for long periods.
The first rule of living in a small town: "Never underestimate how fast Aunt Mae can call the other fives town gossips, one of which will inevitably be married to the mayor or the preacher." Also, accuracy of information is completely irrelevant when it comes to the ability of a small town to violate your privacy. If word gets out you're gay, you're fucked. Whether you're gay or not makes absolutely no difference to them.
How is that a problem? Or are you just flambaiting due to self-imposed prejudices against Americans?
Well not really. Supposing that there are civilian informants that are in danger due to the wikileaks stuff, as long as the U.S. military remains in Afghanistan, it can offer some bit of sanctuary to said civilian. If, however, the U.S. military pulls out, then those civilians are still in danger due to nothing more than the desire for vengeance. Whoever was fighting the U.S. military while it was there will just use the power vacancy as an excuse to do whatever the hell they want, including hunting down those that conspired with Americans.
Now, I want to make it clear that such an argument should never be used as a reason to keep the U.S. military in the middle east perpetually, but it's not quite as simple as, "Just leave and everything will get better."
Thank you for that post. It's always nice to see two sides of an argument even if one side is consistently modded up while another side is consistently modded down. You know slashdot mods, when this site claims to have the best moderation system on the internet, that's not a challenge to see if you can prove it false. Scrameustache has been asking for evidence, facts, and specific accounts of why someone might be disgruntled with Assange throughout this entire thread and Dhalka here has done his best to give him exactly that. It's an informative post with some interesting links and reads in it. It may not get everything 100% right (I don't know, I haven't read through all of the links yet), but it certainly does bring a bit of rational balance back to this thread.
In short, posts like this need to be modded up, not neglected because they don't align with a very common sentiment held on slashdot.
Thanks Dhalka.
The fact that the U.S. Government keeps the public ignorant about so many things is not nearly as sad or as troubling or even as dangerous as the fact that the majority of the U.S. public wants to remain ignorant.
The absurdity of the whole thing is staggering.
Which is precisely what makes me wonder if there is some subtler game afoot that we are not aware of. The sheer fact that all this Wikileaks stuff keeps getting brought up, and keeps successfully whipping the electorate into a finely divided idealistic mob makes me somewhat wary. I mean, honestly, with all the money, tech, and power at the hands of the U.S. government (with everything from the CIA to the DHS) do we really believe that it is not capable of silently and capably suppressing or putting down whatever threat Wikileaks poses to it?
Well I think his original point is that while you, or I, or he may not be willing to trust a company like Facebook, there are others that do. And while you, or I, or he would assume ourselves safe because we don't trust Facebook, we are not because those that do trust Facebook may post stuff about us. For instance, I am currently renting a condo that is part of an HOA. My fellow HOA members (especially the older ladies) have a very bad habit of gossiping about their neighbors and sticking their noses into other folks' business. That includes me and my business. I can't count how often I've caught my neighbor peeking over my fence for no apparent reason. Suppose one of these neighbors decides to start a blog about her neighbors, or about local community gossip, or, hell, just a blog or a Facebook account dedicated to our condo complex. Were that to happen, I would wager that there would be numerous details about myself, my at-home vs. time-away habits, and probably even some nasty rumors being posted to the internet about me. This would occur despite any efforts on my part to keep such information private. This is where the ethical issue becomes a real problem
It is easy to say, "If you don't want it known, don't post it on the internet." Okay, fine. Suppose I don't post my daily hours spent at home on the internet because I don't want less scrupulous folk to know when it is a good time to rob my house. Suppose my neighbor, however, in all of his or her infinite wisdom posts these details as part of her weekly gossip blog or whatever. Well then I am screwed by somebody else's actions, not my own. This is why the issue becomes more complicated than simply, "Don't post stuff to the internet!" I may not. That doesn't mean my friends, neighbors, or family also won't.
You can change your solution to, "Well, don't socialize with idiots that don't understand privacy issues, and move to a new location." But where does it end? Should I really have to uproot my life and burn some old bridges that I am rather fond of because some faceless companies and organizations out there don't have enough scruples to stay the hell out of my business, both online and offline? Honestly, the type of data scraping we are talking about here amounts to nothing short of talking actions were they performed in the meatspace. If someone followed me around for days on end to compile all the details of my life, recording conversations I have with what people, recording where I eat, recording who I visit and so on, I would have grounds to press a stalking charge against them. Can I do that with these data scraping companies online?
And to top it all off, these companies don't even get shit right 9/10 times. For instance, if you get charged with a traffic infraction, DMV gets notified of the infraction filing. If, then, you fight the charge and win in court, then you are supposed to have a clean record. The court should contact DMV to update your driving record to read as clean. If this company doesn't update it's database, however, it may well still list a traffic infraction on your master driving record. Next time your insurance premiums get addressed by your insurance company, they see a ticket (which you successfully beat) on your record (because the data company hasn't updated it's info yet), and now you have to fight your own damn insurance to get your rates back down and get your record clear. And if you think that's preposterous, it's not. I know for a fact that my insurance company, Geico, and my secondary insurance company, Progressive, both use the same data scraping services for their customer records. They do not contact DMV directly. And this has resulted in errors on my insurance record before that do not exist on my driving record.
So hopefully you can see, this isn't just about doofus's posting about their own bad habits online. This is becoming an epidemic of misinformation and rumor being used for official actions that affect folks lives on a regular basis.