The U.S. is as concerned about "privacy rights" as casinos are in letting you win. The quote comes from State Department flunky Josette Shiner, a 15-year veteran of the Washington Times and a member of the cult known as the "Unification Church". When a Moonie tells you, on behalf of the U.S. Government, that the government is interested in personal privacy it's time to run in the other direction as fast as possible. FWIW Shiner got her appointment from Bush to the State Dept. as a political favor to the Moonies for their support.
When a woman who has spent the majority of her adult life in service to Rev. Moon there's very little credibility there.
It's about time somebody besides the EFF went to bat for something against the bad guys. On a related note (rights enforcement) there are a ton of GPL violators out there, especially in the arena of small devices running embedded Linux. I wish the copyright holders of the code running on those devices would attempt to enforce their rights against those who blatantly violate the GPL. They usually leave that aspect up to someone else. I like the EFF and support what they do (albeit with smallish donations). I'm starting to wonder how effective they are, though.
I hope the BitTorrent guys are successful against the second- and third-lowest forms of life: spyware and adware. (Spammers are the lowest known form.)
The NFL pays no taxes. It's a non-profit entity under current tax law. The individual teams use every loophole in the book to just about avoid paying any taxes either. Not to mention the fact that over the last 10 years 21 NFL teams have suckered $4.5 billion from local taxpayers in various cities to build themselves nice new stadiums. There ain't no flow from the NFL or its franchises into puclic coffers by way of taxes. That's my point, jackass.
The Super Bowl is a game played by privately owned teams. It brings in hundreds of millions in revenue for the NFL from advertising.
Tell me again... why do taxpayer dollars have to pay for security at this game? Let the NFL pay for their own damn security. Or is the NFL technically a "foreign country"?
It's ironic that this story was posted today. Only 3 hours ago I used the Yahoo search engine for the first time ever. Google has been serving me a ton of broken cache links over the last few weeks, and today I finally had enough. Google also needs a way to turn off their supplemental search results. If there are only 2 or 3 hits on something then that's all I need to see. I don't need 3 extra pages of dreck. I got modded as a troll for posting these sentiments in a different story the other day but I am completely serious. I have had Google as my home page for 5 years now and I'm not abandoning it. I'm just saying that if Google wants to maintain their overall superiority and excellence of quality there are a few things they need to attend to.
My first exposure to adverware was just the other day. The local CompUSA store had a display with boxes of free DVD games, sponsored by Verizon. I took one and when I got home I noticed very prominently on the box the names "blockdot" and "kewlbox.com". A quick google search didn't return any hits warning about sypware or adware or anything else. In fact most of the hits were related to business stories. I haven't installed the games yet. I doubt that I will.
Maybe it's just me but the regular, good ol' Google web search engine seems to be getting a little punchy lately. There are at least a dozen searches a day that return useless hits or links to cache pages that return an error when clicked on. Not surprising that they are making other mistakes as well.
I hope a few of these units leak out into the marketplace before being neutered with DRM. It would be easy then to compare the difference between them and figure out how to remove the offending bits. Hmmm. Now that I think about it, is the DRM really an add-on to the point where you could manufacture them and ready them for shipment, awaiting only an easy DRM plugin? Is the DRM merely firmware or is it somehow embedded more deeply into the electronics?
The US will be re-districted into 6 super states: New York, Florida, Ohio, Texas, California, and Montana. Governors will be appointed by the King. All taxes will be administered at the Federal level to avoid confusion. Collecting sales tax will be easy this way. In fact, businesses won't even complain because the government will be monitoring every single transaction 24 hours a day 7 days a week (they already do this) so they will be able to take their cut off the top of every transaction.
The 21-30 age group is looking for more than intellectual challenge when they pick a career. Some goals that go beyond this are: glamor, fashion, job security, good-looking members of the opposite sex, influential go-getters, big Buck$, etc. I think comp sci is probably the last career choice you would make if you were looking for any of these things in your early career. Certainly the outsourcing trend has diminished at least the perception that computer programming is a career choice with a bright future. Sure, the best won't have to worry. Despite the outsourcing of late there is still demand for good people right here in the good ol' USA. For those who cannot rise to that level, the number of good-paying jobs with a stable future and room for growth is being reduced. On many levels this is just more supply and demand.
Macromedia should school Adobe on how to do proper Help files. Seriously, for high profile products like Adobe has I have NEVER seen worse built-in "help". Acrobat and Premiere use PDF files. Photoshop and Premiere use clunky HTML pages. Both suck ass. I realize Adobe likes to standardize on cross-platform solutions, but they seriously need to consider proper Windows help file formats, preferably HTML Help 2.0. Their existing HTML help files are already probably 80% of what they need to be for HTML Help 2.0. At least Macromedia provides decent Help. Adobe should take a cue from them. Unfortunately, they'll probably take only Flash and Dreamweaver and toss the rest.
Noted security expert or political hack,... noted security expert or political hack,... noted security expert of political hack?
It's not even close. On the credibility front Schneier has hundreds - no, thousands - of times more credibility on this issue than a political appoiontee out of the White House. Actually it's infinitely more credibility because anything times zero is zero where the White House is concerned.
So they get to continue pushing their crap and the only difference is that the CSO - Chief Sleaze Officer - must personally approve every payload turd. Fantastic. They need to be shut down, not threatened with a slap on the wrist.
Ah, Railroad Tycoon! Keep the nVidia SLI and the ATi Crossfire setups with all their fancy GDDR3 RAM and pixel pipelines. Railroad Tycoon ran on basic hardware and was, quite simply, one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played. I've yet to find one better. Technology is nice but as someone once said, it's not the tools... it's the carpenter.
There were only 2 comments when I first clicked on it. Does someone, someplace offer an early warning service that notifies them when Slashdot has linked to them, so that they may take their servers offline in advance of an avalanche of connections?
Or rather, the lack of it. The U.S. passed a law last year that prohibits credit card companies from extending credit to Americans for online gambling purposes. All the other reasons do have some validity to be sure, but when you follow the money you can easily see how the flow has dried up. It used to be very easy to open an account and deposit a hundred or two and start playing.
Now you have to jump through all kinds of hoops to get your money in and out. Personally I don't think it's any of the government's business. It's interesting to me that when the allegedly "conservative" Republican party comes to power, in favor of smaller less-intrusive government, that the most draconians intrusions into our privacy has taken place. Oh, the Democrats aren't saints either, but at least they're out in the open about it. The Republicans are sneaky hypocrites and that makes them worse in my eyes.
+5 insightful? IBM has the most extensive documentation you'lll find. If you didn't have a complete set of manuals it was probably your employer's fault. IBM has always provided more-than-adequate documentation.
Absoultely. I was a mainframe systems programmer for 10 years and never had a lick of OS-specific college courses. The ability to think logically coupled with a sound understanding of the fundamentals of digital computing counts far more than anything else. AFAIC that counts more than anything. The same thing is true whether it's mainframes, PCs or embedded systems. Some MS droids would have you think differently, but just because there is no MS-whatever "certification" involved doesn't mean a person is not qualified to do the job.
If it has to do with Copyright, Patents or Trademarks and Orrin "For-Sale" Hatch is involved you really don't have to investigate a whole lot to conclude it's probably a bad idea. When the first paragraph of the article says he held a committee meeting on the eve of the Summer Recess and HE WAS THE ONLY ONE IN ATTENDANCE then you KNOW beyond the shadow of a doubt the proposed legistlation is corrupt to the core.
Guess again. The recent CAFTA trade treaty forces the banana republics of Central America (no offense intended) to adopt virtually every Copyright, Patent and Trademark law verbatim as dictated by the USA (I refuse to use the term "intellectual property" because there is no such thing in the eyes of the law. At least no yet.)
Every country will eventually be coerced into doing the same, either with trade/financial incentives and punitive sanctions for the unwilling, or worse. Worse would come later, of course, but it will happen if necessary. Treaties will be enacted that will force every country who wants to play in the international technical markets to comply. The USA produces virtually no hard goods anymore. Steel? Autos? Electronics? Manufactured goods of every kind? These hard goods are not made in the USA anymore.
Wake up and smell the coffee. "Intellectual Property" (OK, so I lied) is the mainstay US export for the rest of this century. The rest of the world is not safe and should be very worried.
Slashdot Mirror
The U.S. is as concerned about "privacy rights" as casinos are in letting you win. The quote comes from State Department flunky Josette Shiner, a 15-year veteran of the Washington Times and a member of the cult known as the "Unification Church". When a Moonie tells you, on behalf of the U.S. Government, that the government is interested in personal privacy it's time to run in the other direction as fast as possible. FWIW Shiner got her appointment from Bush to the State Dept. as a political favor to the Moonies for their support.
When a woman who has spent the majority of her adult life in service to Rev. Moon there's very little credibility there.
It's about time somebody besides the EFF went to bat for something against the bad guys. On a related note (rights enforcement) there are a ton of GPL violators out there, especially in the arena of small devices running embedded Linux. I wish the copyright holders of the code running on those devices would attempt to enforce their rights against those who blatantly violate the GPL. They usually leave that aspect up to someone else. I like the EFF and support what they do (albeit with smallish donations). I'm starting to wonder how effective they are, though.
I hope the BitTorrent guys are successful against the second- and third-lowest forms of life: spyware and adware. (Spammers are the lowest known form.)
The NFL pays no taxes. It's a non-profit entity under current tax law. The individual teams use every loophole in the book to just about avoid paying any taxes either. Not to mention the fact that over the last 10 years 21 NFL teams have suckered $4.5 billion from local taxpayers in various cities to build themselves nice new stadiums. There ain't no flow from the NFL or its franchises into puclic coffers by way of taxes. That's my point, jackass.
The Super Bowl is a game played by privately owned teams. It brings in hundreds of millions in revenue for the NFL from advertising.
Tell me again... why do taxpayer dollars have to pay for security at this game? Let the NFL pay for their own damn security. Or is the NFL technically a "foreign country"?
It's ironic that this story was posted today. Only 3 hours ago I used the Yahoo search engine for the first time ever. Google has been serving me a ton of broken cache links over the last few weeks, and today I finally had enough. Google also needs a way to turn off their supplemental search results. If there are only 2 or 3 hits on something then that's all I need to see. I don't need 3 extra pages of dreck. I got modded as a troll for posting these sentiments in a different story the other day but I am completely serious. I have had Google as my home page for 5 years now and I'm not abandoning it. I'm just saying that if Google wants to maintain their overall superiority and excellence of quality there are a few things they need to attend to.
My first exposure to adverware was just the other day. The local CompUSA store had a display with boxes of free DVD games, sponsored by Verizon. I took one and when I got home I noticed very prominently on the box the names "blockdot" and "kewlbox.com". A quick google search didn't return any hits warning about sypware or adware or anything else. In fact most of the hits were related to business stories. I haven't installed the games yet. I doubt that I will.
Maybe it's just me but the regular, good ol' Google web search engine seems to be getting a little punchy lately. There are at least a dozen searches a day that return useless hits or links to cache pages that return an error when clicked on. Not surprising that they are making other mistakes as well.
Jem of the year? Hahahaha. Good one. Next article, please.
I hope a few of these units leak out into the marketplace before being neutered with DRM. It would be easy then to compare the difference between them and figure out how to remove the offending bits. Hmmm. Now that I think about it, is the DRM really an add-on to the point where you could manufacture them and ready them for shipment, awaiting only an easy DRM plugin? Is the DRM merely firmware or is it somehow embedded more deeply into the electronics?
The US will be re-districted into 6 super states: New York, Florida, Ohio, Texas, California, and Montana. Governors will be appointed by the King. All taxes will be administered at the Federal level to avoid confusion. Collecting sales tax will be easy this way. In fact, businesses won't even complain because the government will be monitoring every single transaction 24 hours a day 7 days a week (they already do this) so they will be able to take their cut off the top of every transaction.
The 21-30 age group is looking for more than intellectual challenge when they pick a career. Some goals that go beyond this are: glamor, fashion, job security, good-looking members of the opposite sex, influential go-getters, big Buck$, etc. I think comp sci is probably the last career choice you would make if you were looking for any of these things in your early career. Certainly the outsourcing trend has diminished at least the perception that computer programming is a career choice with a bright future. Sure, the best won't have to worry. Despite the outsourcing of late there is still demand for good people right here in the good ol' USA. For those who cannot rise to that level, the number of good-paying jobs with a stable future and room for growth is being reduced. On many levels this is just more supply and demand.
Macromedia should school Adobe on how to do proper Help files. Seriously, for high profile products like Adobe has I have NEVER seen worse built-in "help". Acrobat and Premiere use PDF files. Photoshop and Premiere use clunky HTML pages. Both suck ass. I realize Adobe likes to standardize on cross-platform solutions, but they seriously need to consider proper Windows help file formats, preferably HTML Help 2.0. Their existing HTML help files are already probably 80% of what they need to be for HTML Help 2.0. At least Macromedia provides decent Help. Adobe should take a cue from them. Unfortunately, they'll probably take only Flash and Dreamweaver and toss the rest.
Zoo Tycoon was OK but Prison Tycoon sux0red. Indian Tycoon sounds interesting. Is it like a Wild West theme?
Who do you trust more?
... noted security expert or political hack, ... noted security expert of political hack?
Noted security expert or political hack,
It's not even close. On the credibility front Schneier has hundreds - no, thousands - of times more credibility on this issue than a political appoiontee out of the White House. Actually it's infinitely more credibility because anything times zero is zero where the White House is concerned.
So they get to continue pushing their crap and the only difference is that the CSO - Chief Sleaze Officer - must personally approve every payload turd. Fantastic. They need to be shut down, not threatened with a slap on the wrist.
You don't get anything and the rest of us who lost a good thing due to your cheapness put you on our hate list.
And cowards like you won't post using your real userid so we can put you on ours.
Ah, Railroad Tycoon! Keep the nVidia SLI and the ATi Crossfire setups with all their fancy GDDR3 RAM and pixel pipelines. Railroad Tycoon ran on basic hardware and was, quite simply, one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played. I've yet to find one better. Technology is nice but as someone once said, it's not the tools... it's the carpenter.
What, the SCO thing didn't work out?
Internal Server Error
There were only 2 comments when I first clicked on it. Does someone, someplace offer an early warning service that notifies them when Slashdot has linked to them, so that they may take their servers offline in advance of an avalanche of connections?
Or rather, the lack of it. The U.S. passed a law last year that prohibits credit card companies from extending credit to Americans for online gambling purposes. All the other reasons do have some validity to be sure, but when you follow the money you can easily see how the flow has dried up. It used to be very easy to open an account and deposit a hundred or two and start playing.
Now you have to jump through all kinds of hoops to get your money in and out. Personally I don't think it's any of the government's business. It's interesting to me that when the allegedly "conservative" Republican party comes to power, in favor of smaller less-intrusive government, that the most draconians intrusions into our privacy has taken place. Oh, the Democrats aren't saints either, but at least they're out in the open about it. The Republicans are sneaky hypocrites and that makes them worse in my eyes.
Too bad. With the amount of money they have at their disposal they shouldn't be having this "problem". Another two words: tough shit.
+5 insightful? IBM has the most extensive documentation you'lll find. If you didn't have a complete set of manuals it was probably your employer's fault. IBM has always provided more-than-adequate documentation.
Absoultely. I was a mainframe systems programmer for 10 years and never had a lick of OS-specific college courses. The ability to think logically coupled with a sound understanding of the fundamentals of digital computing counts far more than anything else. AFAIC that counts more than anything. The same thing is true whether it's mainframes, PCs or embedded systems. Some MS droids would have you think differently, but just because there is no MS-whatever "certification" involved doesn't mean a person is not qualified to do the job.
If it has to do with Copyright, Patents or Trademarks and Orrin "For-Sale" Hatch is involved you really don't have to investigate a whole lot to conclude it's probably a bad idea. When the first paragraph of the article says he held a committee meeting on the eve of the Summer Recess and HE WAS THE ONLY ONE IN ATTENDANCE then you KNOW beyond the shadow of a doubt the proposed legistlation is corrupt to the core.
Guess again. The recent CAFTA trade treaty forces the banana republics of Central America (no offense intended) to adopt virtually every Copyright, Patent and Trademark law verbatim as dictated by the USA (I refuse to use the term "intellectual property" because there is no such thing in the eyes of the law. At least no yet.)
Every country will eventually be coerced into doing the same, either with trade/financial incentives and punitive sanctions for the unwilling, or worse. Worse would come later, of course, but it will happen if necessary. Treaties will be enacted that will force every country who wants to play in the international technical markets to comply. The USA produces virtually no hard goods anymore. Steel? Autos? Electronics? Manufactured goods of every kind? These hard goods are not made in the USA anymore.
Wake up and smell the coffee. "Intellectual Property" (OK, so I lied) is the mainstay US export for the rest of this century. The rest of the world is not safe and should be very worried.