Oh come on, the submitter's name is linked to PC Mag's website fer crying out loud. This has advert written all over it - the only question is which company (PC Magazine or the pen testers) paid the most for it.
Also, you can't reasonably expect any privacy in email unless you encrypt its contents.
I disagree, I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect privacy from your email. Just because someone *could* intercept and read it doesn't mean that they *should*. As others have pointed out, email really isn't like a postcard, you can't just accidentally glimpse the contents as you handle it as part of your job. You have to make a special effort to copy the email in transit, which to my mind is an unreasonable action (workplace policies not withstanding).
To recharge current laptop batteries in 1 minute on 120V would require a 30 amp outlet
Cool - over here in the UK we have 230V supplies with 13A maximums on the normal ring mains circuit, and 30A (40A?) circuits for electric cookers that we could presumably add a dedicated socket on to.
Armed guards are probably legal, and using the fire suppression system you could probably get away with if you didn't specifically give orders to use it as a weapon, but the electrical booby trap is almost certainly illegal. If nothing else it almost certainly contravenes local health and safety laws.
Hotmail - try moving your email. You can easily forward your Gmail
There's an option to forward mail from a Hotmail account too, although you have to dig for it a bit. Windows Live Mail (freely downloadable) will also connect to a Hotmail account and download all the mail in it, so a) you could get it out that way and b) the facility exists and so could be implemented by another client. Obviously that's not as straightforward, but it's another option, and many clients will import mail from it (as it's essentially a rebranded and upgraded Outlook Express)
Well, if you think paying $20 for a DRM'ed CD full of crappy, with low-audio quality music at the same price that a vinyl disc in the old times is NOT a ripoff, then I ask what the fuck are YOU on.
So it's a rip off, so don't buy it. That doesn't give you the right to break the law by copying it without permission.
Card data are usually stored in cookies encrypted under the SSL symmetric key.
I've worked in the web for 8.5 years now, and have worked on a lot of ecommerce sites in that time. I have never seen any, not one, that stores anything at all in a cookie other than a session id. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to be storing credit card details in them - in fact I would go so far as to recommend avoiding any online store that did this, SSL-encryption or no. It's just begging to be exploited.
Also:
As an aside, organ donors in Europe have to opt-out to NOT become an organ donor, i.e., uncheck the box.
Sorry, but I have a card in my wallet that proves this wrong. I'm in the UK and you have to specifically register to be an organ donor. You don't have to carry the card they send you, but you do have to be in the database of registered donors.
With these two errors, I'd have to say I'm suspicious of the rest of the article; how much more have they got wrong?
It's quite plausible that the latter would happen, as a result of increasing immersion in the music culture
And it's just as plausible that the opposite would happen, due to the easy availability of free music. I know people who buy more now because they get to try before they buy, and I know people who haven't bought a CD in years because they no longer have to.
Hell, some days it seems like the whole systems department where I work does nothing but trade stuff they've downloaded...
Congratulations, you have one counter-example. Would you care for me to provide a list of examples to counter yours, or shall we just agree that there are tens of thousands and leave it at that?
If webmaster404 was correct, then you'd expect the list of the world's richest people to be full of geeks, for the board members of most large national and multinational companies to be mostly geeks. That simply isn't the case.
And for "skills" in IT, think about how "high tech" America is, yet the average consumer doesn't know any more then how to use an iPod, get around in Word and surf the net
So what? You don't have to know how a tool works to be able to use it, and computers are merely sophisticated tools.
Just wait 5 years and the average/. reader will have the skills needed to thrive and those who have spent thousands going to "business school" will be working in a way for the "geeks"
People have been saying that sort of thing since the 70s, if not before. Yet I see far, far more MBA-type CEOs, etc than geek-type ones.
And the geeks shall inherit the earth? Hardly. We don't have the personality for it.
Have you ever, honestly, been to a website that freezes Firefox?
Yes, I have. There's a dating/forums site called plentyoffish that regularly freezes Firefox for me (at least as of 2.0.0.8). Sometimes the browser recovers quickly, sometimes it recovers slowly, sometimes I give up waiting and kill it.
Actually, the only people claiming that Macs are immune to malware, are people like you claiming others are doing so specifically so you can say these mythical people are wrong.
No actually I've seen comments here to that effect, and have argued with the posters from time to time. Not many people claim that Macs or Linux boxes are immune, but they do exist.
Not a virus - this doesn't install itself.
Viruses don't install themselves either, they need to be run by the user. Worms are the autonomous ones.
The onus of protecting rights should be on the holder of the rights.
In general I disagree; I don't think it's fair that a company or person should lose a patent simply because they don't know that someone else is infringing on it, or for whatever reason is unable to take action.
For something like this, though, I agree wholeheartedly. There's no way they didn't realise that people were making and selling wi-fi devices; it's simply not possible.
Just don't ask me where to draw the line between "Fair enough, you didn't know" and "Oh come off it, stop taking the piss". But that's why I'm not a legislator...
Because if they had, it would have been perfectly clear that by "the BBC website" he meant bbc.co.uk, as that's actually part of the referenced quote. Given that the site is one of the most popular in the UK, and is used by people from all walks of life, I'd say that their OS usage stats stand fair chance of being representative of reality...
until you buy the game, install and run it do you!! Gotcha!
Well, you tend to also get them in the demo for the game, which may put me off buying the game. I don't have the cash to buy every game I like the look of, so even the littlest thing can be a deal breaker. It's not my loss...
Like, wouldnt it be annoying if they put ads in game while you play?!
Actually no, unless they were unskippable cut scenes. Posters and billboards, etc, as long as they're appropriate to the setting of the game, really don't bother me. Chances are I'm going to be too busy concentrating on not getting killed to really notice them anyway.
Now of course, it would be nice if the game was cheaper because of them, but that's not enough to annoy me by itself.
at least people could verify the integrity of the systems
How would they do that?
Access to the source of the code running on your own PC is an excellent thing. It lets you modify it, confirm that it does only what it claims to do, find and fix bugs, and so on.
Access to the source of the code running on a machine that you have no control over is useless. You cannot confirm that it is the source of the running code. You cannot confirm that there are no hardware issues - intentional or otherwise - that are affecting the correct operation of the code.
Your swipe at MS, while predictable, is entirely irrelevant to this discussion. To continue your analogy, you want the source to the code running on your XBox or Playstation because you don't trust it. You don't trust the company providing the code, but they also provide the hardware and yet you do trust that?
You don't trust the system. You need to be able to verify the correct operation of the system. Access to the source to one part of that system does not give you anything but a false sense of security.
The point of this issue is that when you have that much money to kill you can get your way no matter what.
That doesn't seem to have worked against Eolas yet.
Generally though I agree; in any non-trivial case, victory often goes to the side with the deepest pockets. That's true of more than just patent disputes though, and is a problem with your legal system, not your patent system.
That sort of thing often sees me simply stop playing the game if it gets in the way too often.
Hell, I remember the train ride at the start of Half Life. Cool as hell the first time. Cool in a "oh yeah" kind of way the second time.
By the third time I played through the game, years later, I thought "Oh, I'd forgotten about this..." and went to make a cup of coffee while I waited for it to play out.
While we're on the subject of stuff you can't skip, adverts at the beginning of a game (eg for NVidia, the publisher, Intel, etc) that you can't skip fuck me off something chronic too. Attention game publishing infidels - I am fully aware of you, the dev house, ATi, NVidia, Intel, and all the other people paying you to piss me off. Please stop pissing me off, or I'll stop buying your games.
Not only that, but generally speaking the single most demanding pat of a game is the graphics, and we have dedicated GPUs for that.
I agree with you; games are power-hungry, but by no means the most power-hungry things you can do with a PC. Mind you, I'm weird - I've actually done proper scientific numerical simulation work (and had to leave it running overnight to finish). I've also done video transcoding, and while that doesn't take as long it wasn't quite real-time last time I did it, so there's definitely still room for improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come on, the submitter's name is linked to PC Mag's website fer crying out loud. This has advert written all over it - the only question is which company (PC Magazine or the pen testers) paid the most for it.
Armed guards are probably legal, and using the fire suppression system you could probably get away with if you didn't specifically give orders to use it as a weapon, but the electrical booby trap is almost certainly illegal. If nothing else it almost certainly contravenes local health and safety laws.
That may be true, but why would Apple care about that? Apple exists to make money, not to hurt MS.
There's an option to forward mail from a Hotmail account too, although you have to dig for it a bit. Windows Live Mail (freely downloadable) will also connect to a Hotmail account and download all the mail in it, so a) you could get it out that way and b) the facility exists and so could be implemented by another client. Obviously that's not as straightforward, but it's another option, and many clients will import mail from it (as it's essentially a rebranded and upgraded Outlook Express)
Card data are usually stored in cookies encrypted under the SSL symmetric key.
I've worked in the web for 8.5 years now, and have worked on a lot of ecommerce sites in that time. I have never seen any, not one, that stores anything at all in a cookie other than a session id. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to be storing credit card details in them - in fact I would go so far as to recommend avoiding any online store that did this, SSL-encryption or no. It's just begging to be exploited.
Also:
As an aside, organ donors in Europe have to opt-out to NOT become an organ donor, i.e., uncheck the box.
Sorry, but I have a card in my wallet that proves this wrong. I'm in the UK and you have to specifically register to be an organ donor. You don't have to carry the card they send you, but you do have to be in the database of registered donors.
With these two errors, I'd have to say I'm suspicious of the rest of the article; how much more have they got wrong?
Hell, some days it seems like the whole systems department where I work does nothing but trade stuff they've downloaded...
Congratulations, you have one counter-example. Would you care for me to provide a list of examples to counter yours, or shall we just agree that there are tens of thousands and leave it at that?
If webmaster404 was correct, then you'd expect the list of the world's richest people to be full of geeks, for the board members of most large national and multinational companies to be mostly geeks. That simply isn't the case.
And for "skills" in IT, think about how "high tech" America is, yet the average consumer doesn't know any more then how to use an iPod, get around in Word and surf the net
/. reader will have the skills needed to thrive and those who have spent thousands going to "business school" will be working in a way for the "geeks"
So what? You don't have to know how a tool works to be able to use it, and computers are merely sophisticated tools.
Just wait 5 years and the average
People have been saying that sort of thing since the 70s, if not before. Yet I see far, far more MBA-type CEOs, etc than geek-type ones.
And the geeks shall inherit the earth? Hardly. We don't have the personality for it.
LinkedIn is pretty big in the UK IT business; more or less every single person I know who's in the industry has an account.
;)
I have heard of Salesforce.com but I would be astonished if anyone outside of a major corporation has
I work for a company of a few dozen people, and I've heard of salesforce. Are you normally this easily astonished?
Have you ever, honestly, been to a website that freezes Firefox?
Yes, I have. There's a dating/forums site called plentyoffish that regularly freezes Firefox for me (at least as of 2.0.0.8). Sometimes the browser recovers quickly, sometimes it recovers slowly, sometimes I give up waiting and kill it.
Actually, the only people claiming that Macs are immune to malware, are people like you claiming others are doing so specifically so you can say these mythical people are wrong.
No actually I've seen comments here to that effect, and have argued with the posters from time to time. Not many people claim that Macs or Linux boxes are immune, but they do exist.
Not a virus - this doesn't install itself.
Viruses don't install themselves either, they need to be run by the user. Worms are the autonomous ones.
The onus of protecting rights should be on the holder of the rights.
In general I disagree; I don't think it's fair that a company or person should lose a patent simply because they don't know that someone else is infringing on it, or for whatever reason is unable to take action.
For something like this, though, I agree wholeheartedly. There's no way they didn't realise that people were making and selling wi-fi devices; it's simply not possible.
Just don't ask me where to draw the line between "Fair enough, you didn't know" and "Oh come off it, stop taking the piss". But that's why I'm not a legislator...
Because if they had, it would have been perfectly clear that by "the BBC website" he meant bbc.co.uk, as that's actually part of the referenced quote. Given that the site is one of the most popular in the UK, and is used by people from all walks of life, I'd say that their OS usage stats stand fair chance of being representative of reality...
until you buy the game, install and run it do you!! Gotcha!
Well, you tend to also get them in the demo for the game, which may put me off buying the game. I don't have the cash to buy every game I like the look of, so even the littlest thing can be a deal breaker. It's not my loss...
Like, wouldnt it be annoying if they put ads in game while you play?!
Actually no, unless they were unskippable cut scenes. Posters and billboards, etc, as long as they're appropriate to the setting of the game, really don't bother me. Chances are I'm going to be too busy concentrating on not getting killed to really notice them anyway.
Now of course, it would be nice if the game was cheaper because of them, but that's not enough to annoy me by itself.
at least people could verify the integrity of the systems
How would they do that?
Access to the source of the code running on your own PC is an excellent thing. It lets you modify it, confirm that it does only what it claims to do, find and fix bugs, and so on.
Access to the source of the code running on a machine that you have no control over is useless. You cannot confirm that it is the source of the running code. You cannot confirm that there are no hardware issues - intentional or otherwise - that are affecting the correct operation of the code.
Your swipe at MS, while predictable, is entirely irrelevant to this discussion. To continue your analogy, you want the source to the code running on your XBox or Playstation because you don't trust it. You don't trust the company providing the code, but they also provide the hardware and yet you do trust that?
You don't trust the system. You need to be able to verify the correct operation of the system. Access to the source to one part of that system does not give you anything but a false sense of security.
Serious question - how would having access to the source code help?
The point of this issue is that when you have that much money to kill you can get your way no matter what.
That doesn't seem to have worked against Eolas yet.
Generally though I agree; in any non-trivial case, victory often goes to the side with the deepest pockets. That's true of more than just patent disputes though, and is a problem with your legal system, not your patent system.
That sort of thing often sees me simply stop playing the game if it gets in the way too often.
Hell, I remember the train ride at the start of Half Life. Cool as hell the first time. Cool in a "oh yeah" kind of way the second time.
By the third time I played through the game, years later, I thought "Oh, I'd forgotten about this..." and went to make a cup of coffee while I waited for it to play out.
While we're on the subject of stuff you can't skip, adverts at the beginning of a game (eg for NVidia, the publisher, Intel, etc) that you can't skip fuck me off something chronic too. Attention game publishing infidels - I am fully aware of you, the dev house, ATi, NVidia, Intel, and all the other people paying you to piss me off. Please stop pissing me off, or I'll stop buying your games.
Not only that, but generally speaking the single most demanding pat of a game is the graphics, and we have dedicated GPUs for that.
I agree with you; games are power-hungry, but by no means the most power-hungry things you can do with a PC. Mind you, I'm weird - I've actually done proper scientific numerical simulation work (and had to leave it running overnight to finish). I've also done video transcoding, and while that doesn't take as long it wasn't quite real-time last time I did it, so there's definitely still room for improvement.
Well yes, of course it does - but that's still not a backend in any sense of the word.