I AM a fan of Solitaire. My game count on my current phone is up over 1K; I figure that across my devices I've played over 5K games. I'm just not a fan of advertising, nor of anything that looks / smells like it.
... or any external speakers...should be possible in theory...
Not "any" external speakers. Powered speakers, (with their own amplifiers between the transducers and the input), won't send any usable signal back to the jack on the computer.
It points out a real problem, and I'm glad the author has the conscience to care and to promote change. But I wonder what can effectively be done. In the average corporate environment, senior programmers are typically read in on the business details only on a need-to-know basis. Low-level code slingers usually don't get told jack. It's pretty difficult to act according to one's conscience given such a dearth of information. And if you demand more information - well, there's always someone waiting to take your job who'll just shut up and code.
The video linked in TFS points out that civilization depends on programmers. For a century or more, it has also depended on engineers; yet we still have Volkswagen-like scandals, not to mention all the mostly-unnoticed little day-to-day ethical compromises made by engineering staff in the name of business. It seems to me that the only solution is for designers and implementers to have a say equal to that of bean-counters, PHB's, and investors. And in our current world-wide corporotocracy, that simply isn't going to happen - at least not in the absence of bloody revolution.
The president has 0 power to do most of the things that people apparently think they do.
That's entirely true, but largely irrelevant to the current discussion. The President certainly does have the power to pardon Snowden; there is no legal impediment, and now that Obama will almost certainly never hold any political office again, there is no substantial political impediment either.
Another commenter here noted that Ford pardoned Nixon when Nixon had never been in court over Watergate. Wikipedia agrees: "A presidential pardon may be granted at any time, however, and as when Ford pardoned Nixon, the pardoned person need not yet have been convicted or even formally charged with a crime". So when Obama says he "can't" pardon Snowden, he's doing something far worse than "phoning it in" - he's lying. It also seems rather cowardly - he should either pardon Snowden, or give whatever real reasons he may have for not doing so. When he hides behind "I can't" and implies that the law forbids him from doing it, he is simply uttering mealy-mouthed weasel words. Way to tarnish your own legacy, Mister President.
...There are very few IoT devices that couldn't provide near 100% of their functionality without ever having to talk outside your local network.
Develop some IoT devices that can do that and that can gracefully handle it when it loses all communication (e.g., your thermostat should still work)...
Great idea, but who's going to do it? The makers of such gear are much more interested in the big bucks they can make from data mining than they are in the chump change they make by selling you an IoT widget. The only reason big companies make IoT gear is data collection; the customers' needs are incidental to that endeavour, and the customers' connection to servers in the cloud is the whole point of the exercise.
...and prepare yourself to take the market by storm. There are a lot of people out there looking for smart devices that don't work worse than their existing ones.
"There are a lot of technically savvy people out there looking for smart devices that don't work worse than their existing ones". FTFY. Unfortunately, there are WAY more non-tech users, (who keep default passwords on their network gear, don't use ad blockers and NoScript, and drop their drawers to Facebook), than there are technically knowledgeable users. And the non-tech users simply don't care, so I predict that someone using your idea won't be taking any markets by storm. It might be a decent niche market though.
The difficulty these days is in getting corporations to fix their shit. In Google's case I suspect that, because the number of products that happen to be users is far bigger than the number of products sold to users, customer service simply isn't part of their mandate. It probably isn't even on their radar until somebody rubs their nose in it publicly.
But it seems that all of that silliness has followed me. First Unity and Gnome 3, and now a conscious and deliberate effort to emulate Windows. I wonder if Zorin will eventually have those oh-so-helpful telemetry 'features' too.
Corporations MUST be people, because only humans can be narcissistic, and this is some serious mirror gazing. It'll be interesting to see how many acolytes cough up the scratch for this outrageous self-love letter.
What about when the SSD craps out? Then it's back to Apple, (or at least to a third-party shop), for an undoubtedly expensive repair job. Great! More stuff that the user has no hope of repairing on his or her own, and more non-renewable materials prematurely tossed into landfill. Tell me again - why in hell would I want a new Apple laptop?
People don't use Firefox because it is slow and bloated compared to Chrome, and it does an awful job imitating the Chrome UI.
As far as I'm concerned, an awful job of imitating Chrome's awful UI might be a good thing. That said, I'm using Pale Moon, so I'm on the pre-Australis Firefox UI. I haven't found any browser UI that's anywhere near as good, much less better.
Kaspersky has been making a good living off of Windows' security deficiencies for about 15 years. Now that Microsoft has decided to turn its own deficiencies into a revenue stream, Kaspersky is upset. I hate Microsoft, but I don't have a lot of sympathy for Kaspersky's laments about the end of the gravy train. I DO have some sympathy for Windows users who have their chosen programs disabled and who are otherwise abused by Microsoft; then again, if they'd just stop bending over and taking it every time Redmond makes 'advances', Windows wouldn't have a near-monopoly on the desktop OS market.
Windows is like Trump's presidency - it exists and has power because too many people of supposedly good conscience did nothing to oppose it. As for Kaspersky: well, Microsoft's sleazy empire-building ways have been obvious for a loooong time. He should have spent more effort on promoting alternatives, and less on oinking at the MS trough.
Scarlett Johansson co-starred in the 2003 Bill Murray movie 'Lost In Translation', about a fading American movie star in Tokyo doing an advertising gig for a liquor company. Now she's in China doing an advertising gig for Alibaba. The last time I checked she was hardly 'fading' though...
5 People Shot At Anti-Trump ProtestAll Are In Critical Condition
What can we do to ensure there are more ?
Go to the protest and play the role of 'utter asshole' that you are so obviously good at. There's a good chance somebody will shoot you, then you will have done your part to "ensure there are more".
FTS: "Now that he is going to run the government..."
I'm a Canadian, so the subtleties of US governance are lost on me; but isn't the President largely a figurehead, except perhaps when it comes to foreign affairs? The Republicans control both Congress and the Senate, and both Congresscritters and Senators have a substantial degree of autonomy when it comes to voting and putting forth legislation, do they not? With the Republicans so much in power, does it really matter much if Trump, Cruz, Rubio, or some generic Republican occupies the White House?
I'm tentatively calling BS on this. FTA, some quotes from the warning that the CBC supposedly issued:
... you have agreed to our our Terms of Use located at... ... I would ask to cease immediately the use of our unlicensed podcasts... ... If you interested in CBC content and podcast, we can discuss a license fee model... ... I would be happy to have a call to discuss further our content and services...
This is a legal matter, and I very much doubt that the Ceeb would send out such a warning without first having its wording vetted by legal staff. It seems that this little missive wasn't even vetted by anyone whose first language is English. Somebody, (perhaps an insider), may be about to lose his or her job over this.
File this under "know your audience:" the EFF is writing for the likes of "series of tubes" senators (and other tech-illiterate government folks), not slashdotters.
This is precisely why the EFF is wasting its breath. Most 'government folks' have no problem with the idea of "controlling users", "spying on users", and "creating lock-in". The EFF's target audience here doesn't know, doesn't want to know, and doesn't care.
No. Eliminating time zones would be even more disruptive, for even less reason, than the accursed Daylight Saving Time. What we should do is eliminate DST world-wide. DST time changes cause automotive accidents, decreased productivity, and biological clock disruptions. Time zone differences are a minor inconvenience - and with modern timekeeping devices such as phones and computers, knowing the correct current time in some other part of the world is trivial. So again, do away with DST and keep time zones.
Hmmm. Ok. I'll take secure and configurable. Thanks.
Not sure your attempt to rework an "old engineering saying" was entirely successful.
I suspect your later use of the word "versatile" would have been a better choice here. "versatile, configurable, secure - pick any two". Yeah, that seems to work.
Good point - thanks. I wasn't entirely satisfied when I wrote the comment, but didn't take the time to figure out why. Your wording expresses my meaning better than mine did.
This reminds of the old engineering saying "good, fast, cheap - pick any two". Only in this case it's "complex, configurable, secure - pick any two". If you want security then you either forego complexity, (so the device can't do a lot, plus all the combinations and permutations of its behaviour can be understood and determined in advance, plus its attack surface is correspondingly smaller), or you forego configurability, (meaning functionality is set in wires or DIP switches or ROM, not by software that can be altered).
Such complex and versatile systems, (such as the Internet), simply can't be protected adequately, unless they're disconnected from the outside world and therefore lose most of their advantages. What comprises solid protection today, probably won't tomorrow. We need to find ways of mitigating damage and recovering quickly; we can't rely on thwarting malicious hacking, because that's simply not possible in the long term. This applies equally to crappy consumer grade IoT gear and hardened SCADA systems. Yes, a good SCADA system is, (or should be), harder to compromise; but usually the payoff is commensurately bigger.
Yup, just the FBI honouring its founder - looking for monsters under beds and, when they don't find any, trying to create them. Helluva make-work project.
How many of these 'crises' are either enormously exaggerated, or manufactured out of whole cloth? After all, they are so very useful for creating jobs, justifying power and autonomy grabs by various TLA's, and distracting the masses from noticing that their basic rights are being systematically torn down and burned.
Yes, by all means, protect this election. Protect it from becoming a third-rate reality show - a freaky, depraved, but strangely irrelevant spectacle that proudly and defiantly puts the 'circus' in 'bread and circuses'. Oh, wait... it's way too late for that.
I'm starting to see the attractions of the Libertarian point of view. It's delusional and naive, to be sure - but would it produce a hell any worse that what we're currently experiencing?
When recording voiceovers, dialog, and narration, people would often like to change or insert a word or a few words due to either a mistake they made or simply because they would like to change part of the narrative...
When recording suspects, police would often like change or insert a word or a few words in order to manufacture evidence by changing part of the narrative.
FTFY
OTOH, if it's really good enough to be undetectable, it might cause a lot of legitimate and unaltered recordings to be thrown out of court on the grounds of reasonable doubt.
Slashdot Mirror
I take it someone isn't a Solitaire fan?
I AM a fan of Solitaire. My game count on my current phone is up over 1K; I figure that across my devices I've played over 5K games. I'm just not a fan of advertising, nor of anything that looks / smells like it.
... or any external speakers...should be possible in theory ...
Not "any" external speakers. Powered speakers, (with their own amplifiers between the transducers and the input), won't send any usable signal back to the jack on the computer.
Stuff that Slashvertisers Shill For". I find it hard to believe that this had sufficient votes to be accepted. 'Editorial licence', perhaps?
It points out a real problem, and I'm glad the author has the conscience to care and to promote change. But I wonder what can effectively be done. In the average corporate environment, senior programmers are typically read in on the business details only on a need-to-know basis. Low-level code slingers usually don't get told jack. It's pretty difficult to act according to one's conscience given such a dearth of information. And if you demand more information - well, there's always someone waiting to take your job who'll just shut up and code.
The video linked in TFS points out that civilization depends on programmers. For a century or more, it has also depended on engineers; yet we still have Volkswagen-like scandals, not to mention all the mostly-unnoticed little day-to-day ethical compromises made by engineering staff in the name of business. It seems to me that the only solution is for designers and implementers to have a say equal to that of bean-counters, PHB's, and investors. And in our current world-wide corporotocracy, that simply isn't going to happen - at least not in the absence of bloody revolution.
The president has 0 power to do most of the things that people apparently think they do.
That's entirely true, but largely irrelevant to the current discussion. The President certainly does have the power to pardon Snowden; there is no legal impediment, and now that Obama will almost certainly never hold any political office again, there is no substantial political impediment either.
Another commenter here noted that Ford pardoned Nixon when Nixon had never been in court over Watergate. Wikipedia agrees: "A presidential pardon may be granted at any time, however, and as when Ford pardoned Nixon, the pardoned person need not yet have been convicted or even formally charged with a crime". So when Obama says he "can't" pardon Snowden, he's doing something far worse than "phoning it in" - he's lying. It also seems rather cowardly - he should either pardon Snowden, or give whatever real reasons he may have for not doing so. When he hides behind "I can't" and implies that the law forbids him from doing it, he is simply uttering mealy-mouthed weasel words. Way to tarnish your own legacy, Mister President.
...There are very few IoT devices that couldn't provide near 100% of their functionality without ever having to talk outside your local network.
Develop some IoT devices that can do that and that can gracefully handle it when it loses all communication (e.g., your thermostat should still work)...
Great idea, but who's going to do it? The makers of such gear are much more interested in the big bucks they can make from data mining than they are in the chump change they make by selling you an IoT widget. The only reason big companies make IoT gear is data collection; the customers' needs are incidental to that endeavour, and the customers' connection to servers in the cloud is the whole point of the exercise.
"There are a lot of technically savvy people out there looking for smart devices that don't work worse than their existing ones". FTFY. Unfortunately, there are WAY more non-tech users, (who keep default passwords on their network gear, don't use ad blockers and NoScript, and drop their drawers to Facebook), than there are technically knowledgeable users. And the non-tech users simply don't care, so I predict that someone using your idea won't be taking any markets by storm. It might be a decent niche market though.
The difficulty these days is in getting corporations to fix their shit. In Google's case I suspect that, because the number of products that happen to be users is far bigger than the number of products sold to users, customer service simply isn't part of their mandate. It probably isn't even on their radar until somebody rubs their nose in it publicly.
But it seems that all of that silliness has followed me. First Unity and Gnome 3, and now a conscious and deliberate effort to emulate Windows. I wonder if Zorin will eventually have those oh-so-helpful telemetry 'features' too.
Your comment is simply insightful, but your sig is friggin' awesome!!!
... there are lawyers who are salivating at the mouth ...
Well, I'm very glad to know that they're not salivating at some other part of their anatomy!
Corporations MUST be people, because only humans can be narcissistic, and this is some serious mirror gazing. It'll be interesting to see how many acolytes cough up the scratch for this outrageous self-love letter.
What about when the SSD craps out? Then it's back to Apple, (or at least to a third-party shop), for an undoubtedly expensive repair job. Great! More stuff that the user has no hope of repairing on his or her own, and more non-renewable materials prematurely tossed into landfill. Tell me again - why in hell would I want a new Apple laptop?
People don't use Firefox because it is slow and bloated compared to Chrome, and it does an awful job imitating the Chrome UI.
As far as I'm concerned, an awful job of imitating Chrome's awful UI might be a good thing. That said, I'm using Pale Moon, so I'm on the pre-Australis Firefox UI. I haven't found any browser UI that's anywhere near as good, much less better.
Kaspersky has been making a good living off of Windows' security deficiencies for about 15 years. Now that Microsoft has decided to turn its own deficiencies into a revenue stream, Kaspersky is upset. I hate Microsoft, but I don't have a lot of sympathy for Kaspersky's laments about the end of the gravy train. I DO have some sympathy for Windows users who have their chosen programs disabled and who are otherwise abused by Microsoft; then again, if they'd just stop bending over and taking it every time Redmond makes 'advances', Windows wouldn't have a near-monopoly on the desktop OS market.
Windows is like Trump's presidency - it exists and has power because too many people of supposedly good conscience did nothing to oppose it. As for Kaspersky: well, Microsoft's sleazy empire-building ways have been obvious for a loooong time. He should have spent more effort on promoting alternatives, and less on oinking at the MS trough.
Scarlett Johansson co-starred in the 2003 Bill Murray movie 'Lost In Translation', about a fading American movie star in Tokyo doing an advertising gig for a liquor company. Now she's in China doing an advertising gig for Alibaba. The last time I checked she was hardly 'fading' though...
5 People Shot At Anti-Trump ProtestAll Are In Critical Condition
What can we do to ensure there are more ?
Go to the protest and play the role of 'utter asshole' that you are so obviously good at. There's a good chance somebody will shoot you, then you will have done your part to "ensure there are more".
FTS: "Now that he is going to run the government..."
I'm a Canadian, so the subtleties of US governance are lost on me; but isn't the President largely a figurehead, except perhaps when it comes to foreign affairs? The Republicans control both Congress and the Senate, and both Congresscritters and Senators have a substantial degree of autonomy when it comes to voting and putting forth legislation, do they not? With the Republicans so much in power, does it really matter much if Trump, Cruz, Rubio, or some generic Republican occupies the White House?
I'm tentatively calling BS on this. FTA, some quotes from the warning that the CBC supposedly issued:
... you have agreed to our our Terms of Use located at ...
... I would ask to cease immediately the use of our unlicensed podcasts ...
... If you interested in CBC content and podcast, we can discuss a license fee model ...
... I would be happy to have a call to discuss further our content and services ...
This is a legal matter, and I very much doubt that the Ceeb would send out such a warning without first having its wording vetted by legal staff. It seems that this little missive wasn't even vetted by anyone whose first language is English. Somebody, (perhaps an insider), may be about to lose his or her job over this.
File this under "know your audience:" the EFF is writing for the likes of "series of tubes" senators (and other tech-illiterate government folks), not slashdotters.
This is precisely why the EFF is wasting its breath. Most 'government folks' have no problem with the idea of "controlling users", "spying on users", and "creating lock-in". The EFF's target audience here doesn't know, doesn't want to know, and doesn't care.
No. Eliminating time zones would be even more disruptive, for even less reason, than the accursed Daylight Saving Time. What we should do is eliminate DST world-wide. DST time changes cause automotive accidents, decreased productivity, and biological clock disruptions. Time zone differences are a minor inconvenience - and with modern timekeeping devices such as phones and computers, knowing the correct current time in some other part of the world is trivial. So again, do away with DST and keep time zones.
Hmmm. Ok. I'll take secure and configurable. Thanks.
Not sure your attempt to rework an "old engineering saying" was entirely successful.
I suspect your later use of the word "versatile" would have been a better choice here. "versatile, configurable, secure - pick any two". Yeah, that seems to work.
Good point - thanks. I wasn't entirely satisfied when I wrote the comment, but didn't take the time to figure out why. Your wording expresses my meaning better than mine did.
This reminds of the old engineering saying "good, fast, cheap - pick any two". Only in this case it's "complex, configurable, secure - pick any two". If you want security then you either forego complexity, (so the device can't do a lot, plus all the combinations and permutations of its behaviour can be understood and determined in advance, plus its attack surface is correspondingly smaller), or you forego configurability, (meaning functionality is set in wires or DIP switches or ROM, not by software that can be altered).
Such complex and versatile systems, (such as the Internet), simply can't be protected adequately, unless they're disconnected from the outside world and therefore lose most of their advantages. What comprises solid protection today, probably won't tomorrow. We need to find ways of mitigating damage and recovering quickly; we can't rely on thwarting malicious hacking, because that's simply not possible in the long term. This applies equally to crappy consumer grade IoT gear and hardened SCADA systems. Yes, a good SCADA system is, (or should be), harder to compromise; but usually the payoff is commensurately bigger.
Yup, just the FBI honouring its founder - looking for monsters under beds and, when they don't find any, trying to create them. Helluva make-work project.
How many of these 'crises' are either enormously exaggerated, or manufactured out of whole cloth? After all, they are so very useful for creating jobs, justifying power and autonomy grabs by various TLA's, and distracting the masses from noticing that their basic rights are being systematically torn down and burned.
Yes, by all means, protect this election. Protect it from becoming a third-rate reality show - a freaky, depraved, but strangely irrelevant spectacle that proudly and defiantly puts the 'circus' in 'bread and circuses'. Oh, wait... it's way too late for that.
I'm starting to see the attractions of the Libertarian point of view. It's delusional and naive, to be sure - but would it produce a hell any worse that what we're currently experiencing?
When recording voiceovers, dialog, and narration, people would often like to change or insert a word or a few words due to either a mistake they made or simply because they would like to change part of the narrative...
When recording suspects, police would often like change or insert a word or a few words in order to manufacture evidence by changing part of the narrative.
FTFY
OTOH, if it's really good enough to be undetectable, it might cause a lot of legitimate and unaltered recordings to be thrown out of court on the grounds of reasonable doubt.