But the chances are very good that a virus will mutate to something that could pose a very real threat of a pandemic.
And once granted, there's a very good chance that this power will mutate into something that could pose a very real threat to people's privacy and liberty. Think "Reds under the Beds", but with Muslims and terrorists instead. Been to a Muslim country? You're on The List. Shared a flight with someone who turns out to be connected to terrorism (however tenuously)? You're on The List. Been to a country they just decided they don't like after all? You're on The List, etc etc. On The List too many times? You're brought in for "questioning".
No, it's not likely - but if the CDC gets access to this data for reasons of national health, it's that much harder to deny it to the FBI, CIA or other TLA for reasons of national security.
If you don't want to give out this information, then don't fly across international borders.
It's flying across international borders now. How long before it's sailing too? How long after that is it crossing state borders?
I know we're not going to agree, but I personally don't like the idea of giving up privacy and making my movements easier to track just for a false sense of security.
It's got nothing to do with taste, Celine Dion just isn't classical according to any definition I'm aware of.
That said - it was a joke. He was saying that playing Celine Dion would drive the kids away, as would John Tesh or classical music. He wasn't saying that Celine is classical, he was saying that Celine is awful...
Now, Sony (etc.) will undoubtedly point to Napster and such as the reason they're not doing as well recently. I don't think that's the case.
I don't doubt that P2P and similar is having a negative impact on sales, and I don't doubt that the impact isn't anywhere nearly as serious as most companies and the RIAA, etc make out.
Piracy is being used as a convenient scapegoat; nothing more, nothing less. Don't think for one second that the people in charge of these companies genuinely believe everything they say in public. What sounds better? "Yes, we're having problems; truth is, we've lost direction, we just don't know what sells anymore" or "It's the pirates and their damned internet sharing, stealing our stuff! We need more help - we need stronger laws to protect us!"? Or even "Yes, it's our fault - we don't really know what to do to turn things around" or "It's not our fault, they're stealing from us almost as fast as we can make it!"?
It's the corporate blame game to cover the execs' arses when their bosses and the shareholders ask what's happening to the juicy profits, bonuses and dividends they've come to expect.
It's not stupidity, and it's not honest; it's business.
Two **Beatles-Beatles stories on the front page at once? You guys might wnat to consider hiring him, he's clearly a journalistic power house. (Assuming he isn't already on the payroll, that is)
Lucky you. I currently have 9 tabs open, a custom theme, the web developer and adblock extensions, and firefox is using 95meg of RAM (and has a VM size of 120meg). I've seen Firefox use hundreds of megs of RAM and even, on one memorable occasion, in excess of a gigabyte.
This isn't as simple as saying "ZOMGWTFBBQ Fixor it Mozilla!"...
No it isn't, but in every story here about FF, you'll see people complaining about the memory usage. I'm not claiming that it's a universal problem (or even necessarily the Moz team's fault), but it seems that something needs to be done about it.
Firefox was supposed to be the lean, fast, lightweight alternative to Mozilla; it doesn't appear to have turned out that way.
Come on, we are talking choices of A) Microsoft and B) someone other than Microsoft.
Well, I use a lot of software under Windows, and Firefox is the only one that leaks memory in this way. I too have seen it use in excess of a gig of RAM.
If you read any story here on FF, you'll see lots of people complaining about its RAM usage; a lot of those are running Linux.
You can blindly (and conveniently) blame someone else if you like; me, when a given app exhibits a given behaviour, I tend to assume that it's the app that's at fault until someone can prove otherwise.
It happens in all sorts of fields - witness the number of posts here from people who clearly understand computers very well, but think that means that they understand topic foo very well too, with foo being anything from economics to business to science.
(In that last regard, I've all-but stopped reading science stories here; with my physics background, it can be a painful experience.)
Now whoever opposes it, even if on the basis of saying it won't be plausible, they will be "unpatriotic"!
Unpatriotic, degenerate, a champion of filth and smut, a corrupting influence, destined to burn in hell, and all the other things the moral minority have thrown in the face of people who aren't offended by a bit of bare flesh. In today's climate, I'm sure someone will suggest some tenuous link to terrorism (just as FACT do in their anti-piracy propaganda) and organised crime.
Never mind God killing a kitten, every time you wank Saddam bin Laden blows up a bus load of school children! Why do you hate Freedemocracy, pornographer?!
After this little fiasco I'm rather more concerned about the quality of the laws that are being enacted than I used to be, even without touching on the "criminalising fantasies between consenting adults" aspect.
To be fair, they're not just trying to ban the websites, they're trying to make accessing them and possessing or producing such content illegal. It's actually worse than trying to ban the websites themselves though; so now a couple who enjoy their sex a little extreme and video it are breaking the law? Or only if they allow a friend (or new partner) to watch it?
I thought we'd grown out of the "TV/films/rock music/$whatever made me do it!" thing a decade or two ago. I guess the internet is the new $whatever.
Because your clients demand Linux (because they don't like the idea of Windows on a server) and Oracle (because the big-name backing gives them the warm fuzzies).
Yes, we have a couple of clients running (small) sites backed by MySQL, but almost all of our larger DB-based sites use Oracle (one or two use MS SQL Server) running on Linux. Up until about 3 months ago, Linux/Oracle also powered our largest DB-based site. Now that title is going to Solaris/Oracle instead, but only because our hosting centre doesn't support x64 yet.
The car is a German invention, but plenty of cars are US-made.
Similarly, the computer is arguably not a US invention, yet plenty of them are made in the US. Likewise programming languages; in fact, that was pretty-much the point of the OP.
2) so he gets a C&D letter, instructing him to remove the offending content... which he's planning on doing anyway. Net result, the company pays some lawyers needlessly.
So far the only game that really scared me was Doom II with the Alients TC mod.
If you've not already tried it, you might want to give System Shock 2 a go (although you may have trouble obtaining a copy). Other games have given me the creeps, but that's the only one that's actually unnerved me after switching it off. I was playing late one night and, before turning in, popped down to the kitchen for a drink. We have a glass door letting out to the garden, and standing there looking out into the dark I couldn't shake the feeling that something was moments away from smashing through the glass to come for me...
Then again, I was a little creeped out by Doom 3 at times, so I may just be a pansy...
Having first convinced a judge that they need access to the information, they can then get the information and start legal proceedings against the defendants who, if they are innocent (and there is any justice) will win. Do that often enough, and most judges are going to think twice before granting such access in the future.
Imagine that all your internal hosts have the prefix "internal" and another site pops up called "internal", we would then have the issue of myhost.internal being difficult to resolve.
How so? I can see where you might have problems, but if you have a sane network with all your machines using a single DNS server/set of servers, then they'll all resolve the same host for myhost.internal. If that happens to shadow a myhost.internal out on the internet, well, thems the breaks, should've used myhost.mycompany.com or myhost.internal.mycompany.com as others have said.
(If you don't have a sane network, then you have bigger issues anyway)
Is it inside the network or outside?
Traceroute and tracert are your friends, depending on your platform of choice.
Many web browsers will (by default) submit a domainless word to a search engine like Google unless the domain is covered by your hosts file.
The actual sequence of events is (paraphrased):
1) User types in "foo" and hits return 2) Browser performs a call to gethostbyname(), passing in "foo" 3) OS attempts to resolve the specified host name ("foo") to an IP address 4) if this succeeds, the browser attempts to make an HTTP connection to it on port 80 (if no port was specified by the user) 5) if that fails, or if the call to gethostbyname() failed to resolve the name, then: 6) (most browsers) if the typed in name did not contain a dot, the browser tries again, adding ".com" to the end (so in this case, it tries "foo.com"). Go to 3). 7) if *that* fails, most browsers then (by default) attempt to search for the entered term at a configured search engine (firefox defaults to google, IE defaults to MSN search)
The browser definitely does not think to itself "Oh, that's obviously not a domain and isn't in the hosts file, I'd better search for it!" - it just asks the OS to resolve the entered name (everything between the http:/// (if entered) and the next / (if entered)). If someone has registered slashdot as a TLD and you type in slashdot, that's what you'll get. If not, then the browser will do whatever it does in the event of a name resolution failure (in my case, tell me it failed - I hate that auto-searching crap)
Bottom line is, it won't know the difference, just as it doesn't know the difference now.
I really fail to understand what anyone hopes to achieve by any form of copy protection...
I think the hope is to make it sufficiently difficult, time consuming or otherwise unattractive to casually copy the content that few people bother, most either buying it or doing without.
None of these measures are aimed at the large, organised counterfeiting rings, they are all aimed at the end consumers, to stop people from copying CDs for friends and family, or ripping them and sharing them on P2P networks and the like.
That's what they hope to achieve. That so far they have largely failed doesn't stop them trying.
Previously, all I've seen is supposition (which is essentially worthless) and surveys (which I am always loathe to trust no matter what the conclusion; they're too easy to skew).
I've not RTFA, but assuming he actually did some proper research, this might just be a useful piece of work; it would certainly make a change in this area.
Re:consumers: pathetic?
on
Amazon Goes Wiki
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I keep an Amazon wish list. Given that I have a family, mortgage, loan payments, etc I often don't have the money to buy the things I want when I see them. I also have a poor memory for that sort of thing, so I keep the list so as to not forget what it was that I wanted.
Of course, I rarely get round to actually buying anything on my list, but that's another matter.
I also know someone who runs a forum-based website with a fair number of users who keeps an amazon wishlist. From time to time people will buy him stuff on it, as a way to say thanks for providing the site (which he does free of charge and in his own time).
I have one word for you friend: compensation. Being out that much money is not a laughing matter, especially if it's disrupted your plans (for shopping, celebrating the holiday, etc) and caused you to miss bill payments.
If I were you, I'd be complaining to them very loud and very clear. Sure, it was a fuck up rather than anything malicious - but it was *their* fuck up, it's caused *you* pain, so they should splash a little cash to say sorry and help put things right. At the very least, they should reimburse any expenses you incur (eg interest charges, fees for late payment of bills, etc)
I wonder if Firefox is the only thing installed, or if Internet Explorer is also on there?
The machine in the shot is clearly running XP, so yes, Internet Explorer is also on there. As to what the default browser is, how easy they've made it to access IE and whose choice it was to be using FF in that shot (e.g. google for a staged photo, J Random Public for a "real life action" shot, etc), I have no idea.
Slashdot Mirror
But the chances are very good that a virus will mutate to something that could pose a very real threat of a pandemic.
And once granted, there's a very good chance that this power will mutate into something that could pose a very real threat to people's privacy and liberty. Think "Reds under the Beds", but with Muslims and terrorists instead. Been to a Muslim country? You're on The List. Shared a flight with someone who turns out to be connected to terrorism (however tenuously)? You're on The List. Been to a country they just decided they don't like after all? You're on The List, etc etc. On The List too many times? You're brought in for "questioning".
No, it's not likely - but if the CDC gets access to this data for reasons of national health, it's that much harder to deny it to the FBI, CIA or other TLA for reasons of national security.
If you don't want to give out this information, then don't fly across international borders.
It's flying across international borders now. How long before it's sailing too? How long after that is it crossing state borders?
I know we're not going to agree, but I personally don't like the idea of giving up privacy and making my movements easier to track just for a false sense of security.
It's got nothing to do with taste, Celine Dion just isn't classical according to any definition I'm aware of.
That said - it was a joke. He was saying that playing Celine Dion would drive the kids away, as would John Tesh or classical music. He wasn't saying that Celine is classical, he was saying that Celine is awful...
Verbal insults are long-term far more harmful than physical violence.
Repeated verbal insults over a protracted period of time (eg bullying), yes. The odd insult in the heat of the moment, no.
The OP is right - in the vast majority of cases, violence simply isn't an appropriate response to being insulted.
Now, Sony (etc.) will undoubtedly point to Napster and such as the reason they're not doing as well recently. I don't think that's the case.
I don't doubt that P2P and similar is having a negative impact on sales, and I don't doubt that the impact isn't anywhere nearly as serious as most companies and the RIAA, etc make out.
Piracy is being used as a convenient scapegoat; nothing more, nothing less. Don't think for one second that the people in charge of these companies genuinely believe everything they say in public. What sounds better? "Yes, we're having problems; truth is, we've lost direction, we just don't know what sells anymore" or "It's the pirates and their damned internet sharing, stealing our stuff! We need more help - we need stronger laws to protect us!"? Or even "Yes, it's our fault - we don't really know what to do to turn things around" or "It's not our fault, they're stealing from us almost as fast as we can make it!"?
It's the corporate blame game to cover the execs' arses when their bosses and the shareholders ask what's happening to the juicy profits, bonuses and dividends they've come to expect.
It's not stupidity, and it's not honest; it's business.
Two **Beatles-Beatles stories on the front page at once? You guys might wnat to consider hiring him, he's clearly a journalistic power house. (Assuming he isn't already on the payroll, that is)
Lucky you. I currently have 9 tabs open, a custom theme, the web developer and adblock extensions, and firefox is using 95meg of RAM (and has a VM size of 120meg). I've seen Firefox use hundreds of megs of RAM and even, on one memorable occasion, in excess of a gigabyte.
...
This isn't as simple as saying "ZOMGWTFBBQ Fixor it Mozilla!"
No it isn't, but in every story here about FF, you'll see people complaining about the memory usage. I'm not claiming that it's a universal problem (or even necessarily the Moz team's fault), but it seems that something needs to be done about it.
Firefox was supposed to be the lean, fast, lightweight alternative to Mozilla; it doesn't appear to have turned out that way.
Come on, we are talking choices of A) Microsoft and B) someone other than Microsoft.
Well, I use a lot of software under Windows, and Firefox is the only one that leaks memory in this way. I too have seen it use in excess of a gig of RAM.
If you read any story here on FF, you'll see lots of people complaining about its RAM usage; a lot of those are running Linux.
You can blindly (and conveniently) blame someone else if you like; me, when a given app exhibits a given behaviour, I tend to assume that it's the app that's at fault until someone can prove otherwise.
How exactly is that easier than using Windows Update, or allowing Automatic Updates to do it all without any intervention at all?
It happens in all sorts of fields - witness the number of posts here from people who clearly understand computers very well, but think that means that they understand topic foo very well too, with foo being anything from economics to business to science.
(In that last regard, I've all-but stopped reading science stories here; with my physics background, it can be a painful experience.)
Man this guy is good, he won't even let you copy paste his web text.
I suspect that's a Firefox incompatibility (or if you prefer, the result of coding to IE's broken renderer), as it works fine in IE.
Now whoever opposes it, even if on the basis of saying it won't be plausible, they will be "unpatriotic"!
Unpatriotic, degenerate, a champion of filth and smut, a corrupting influence, destined to burn in hell, and all the other things the moral minority have thrown in the face of people who aren't offended by a bit of bare flesh. In today's climate, I'm sure someone will suggest some tenuous link to terrorism (just as FACT do in their anti-piracy propaganda) and organised crime.
Never mind God killing a kitten, every time you wank Saddam bin Laden blows up a bus load of school children! Why do you hate Freedemocracy, pornographer?!
Mmmmm, smell that knee-jerk respsone goodness.
After this little fiasco I'm rather more concerned about the quality of the laws that are being enacted than I used to be, even without touching on the "criminalising fantasies between consenting adults" aspect.
To be fair, they're not just trying to ban the websites, they're trying to make accessing them and possessing or producing such content illegal. It's actually worse than trying to ban the websites themselves though; so now a couple who enjoy their sex a little extreme and video it are breaking the law? Or only if they allow a friend (or new partner) to watch it?
I thought we'd grown out of the "TV/films/rock music/$whatever made me do it!" thing a decade or two ago. I guess the internet is the new $whatever.
Because your clients demand Linux (because they don't like the idea of Windows on a server) and Oracle (because the big-name backing gives them the warm fuzzies).
Yes, we have a couple of clients running (small) sites backed by MySQL, but almost all of our larger DB-based sites use Oracle (one or two use MS SQL Server) running on Linux. Up until about 3 months ago, Linux/Oracle also powered our largest DB-based site. Now that title is going to Solaris/Oracle instead, but only because our hosting centre doesn't support x64 yet.
The car is a German invention, but plenty of cars are US-made.
Similarly, the computer is arguably not a US invention, yet plenty of them are made in the US. Likewise programming languages; in fact, that was pretty-much the point of the OP.
Wow, so much anger for such a trivial little thing.
Two points:
1) that may well fall under fair use
2) so he gets a C&D letter, instructing him to remove the offending content... which he's planning on doing anyway. Net result, the company pays some lawyers needlessly.
So far the only game that really scared me was Doom II with the Alients TC mod.
If you've not already tried it, you might want to give System Shock 2 a go (although you may have trouble obtaining a copy). Other games have given me the creeps, but that's the only one that's actually unnerved me after switching it off. I was playing late one night and, before turning in, popped down to the kitchen for a drink. We have a glass door letting out to the garden, and standing there looking out into the dark I couldn't shake the feeling that something was moments away from smashing through the glass to come for me...
Then again, I was a little creeped out by Doom 3 at times, so I may just be a pansy...
Having first convinced a judge that they need access to the information, they can then get the information and start legal proceedings against the defendants who, if they are innocent (and there is any justice) will win. Do that often enough, and most judges are going to think twice before granting such access in the future.
Imagine that all your internal hosts have the prefix "internal" and another site pops up called "internal", we would then have the issue of myhost.internal being difficult to resolve.
How so? I can see where you might have problems, but if you have a sane network with all your machines using a single DNS server/set of servers, then they'll all resolve the same host for myhost.internal. If that happens to shadow a myhost.internal out on the internet, well, thems the breaks, should've used myhost.mycompany.com or myhost.internal.mycompany.com as others have said.
(If you don't have a sane network, then you have bigger issues anyway)
Is it inside the network or outside?
Traceroute and tracert are your friends, depending on your platform of choice.
Many web browsers will (by default) submit a domainless word to a search engine like Google unless the domain is covered by your hosts file.
The actual sequence of events is (paraphrased):
1) User types in "foo" and hits return
2) Browser performs a call to gethostbyname(), passing in "foo"
3) OS attempts to resolve the specified host name ("foo") to an IP address
4) if this succeeds, the browser attempts to make an HTTP connection to it on port 80 (if no port was specified by the user)
5) if that fails, or if the call to gethostbyname() failed to resolve the name, then:
6) (most browsers) if the typed in name did not contain a dot, the browser tries again, adding ".com" to the end (so in this case, it tries "foo.com"). Go to 3).
7) if *that* fails, most browsers then (by default) attempt to search for the entered term at a configured search engine (firefox defaults to google, IE defaults to MSN search)
The browser definitely does not think to itself "Oh, that's obviously not a domain and isn't in the hosts file, I'd better search for it!" - it just asks the OS to resolve the entered name (everything between the http:/// (if entered) and the next / (if entered)). If someone has registered slashdot as a TLD and you type in slashdot, that's what you'll get. If not, then the browser will do whatever it does in the event of a name resolution failure (in my case, tell me it failed - I hate that auto-searching crap)
Bottom line is, it won't know the difference, just as it doesn't know the difference now.
I really fail to understand what anyone hopes to achieve by any form of copy protection...
I think the hope is to make it sufficiently difficult, time consuming or otherwise unattractive to casually copy the content that few people bother, most either buying it or doing without.
None of these measures are aimed at the large, organised counterfeiting rings, they are all aimed at the end consumers, to stop people from copying CDs for friends and family, or ripping them and sharing them on P2P networks and the like.
That's what they hope to achieve. That so far they have largely failed doesn't stop them trying.
Previously, all I've seen is supposition (which is essentially worthless) and surveys (which I am always loathe to trust no matter what the conclusion; they're too easy to skew).
I've not RTFA, but assuming he actually did some proper research, this might just be a useful piece of work; it would certainly make a change in this area.
I keep an Amazon wish list. Given that I have a family, mortgage, loan payments, etc I often don't have the money to buy the things I want when I see them. I also have a poor memory for that sort of thing, so I keep the list so as to not forget what it was that I wanted.
Of course, I rarely get round to actually buying anything on my list, but that's another matter.
I also know someone who runs a forum-based website with a fair number of users who keeps an amazon wishlist. From time to time people will buy him stuff on it, as a way to say thanks for providing the site (which he does free of charge and in his own time).
I have one word for you friend: compensation. Being out that much money is not a laughing matter, especially if it's disrupted your plans (for shopping, celebrating the holiday, etc) and caused you to miss bill payments.
If I were you, I'd be complaining to them very loud and very clear. Sure, it was a fuck up rather than anything malicious - but it was *their* fuck up, it's caused *you* pain, so they should splash a little cash to say sorry and help put things right. At the very least, they should reimburse any expenses you incur (eg interest charges, fees for late payment of bills, etc)
I wonder if Firefox is the only thing installed, or if Internet Explorer is also on there?
The machine in the shot is clearly running XP, so yes, Internet Explorer is also on there. As to what the default browser is, how easy they've made it to access IE and whose choice it was to be using FF in that shot (e.g. google for a staged photo, J Random Public for a "real life action" shot, etc), I have no idea.