Was looking at getting a dice roller on my phone, and one of the free apps I was looking at had a number of 1-star ratings because the dice roller needed access to dialing out, the internet, and who-knows-what-else.
The author of the app just put up an apologetic, "We need all those permissions on this app to get Google Ads to work", without bothering to fix the underlying cause. He didn't need all the permissions he was asking for.
Neat. I used to work for the UCSD Bioengineering department. Many, many smart people worked there. Much more so than the San Diego Supercomputer Center during the tech boom (half the people they hired during that time period were people who'd read a "Learn Programming in 30 Days" book, or whatever, because anyone with any skills were going into industry).
>>18 years from now, you won't be able to legally play that game
18 years? They've been shutting down Madden servers after 18 months.
This is EA's wet dream rent-seeking business plan - being able to force people to buy the same game over and over each year. Maximum profits for minimum cost.
>>Have a non-insane pricing plan that actually decreases the cost of new games progressively as time goes on
Yeah, I looked at buying Oblivion a couple months back for my wife on the Xbox 360. Even though it's not moddable like the PC version, she's more comfortable on the couch.
I really wish I knew what this phrase meant. It sounds fascinating.
But seriously, if there's no performance gain from multithreading, it can be a really good idea to move away from the complexity of it. There's a lot of traps people can fall into with concurrent code if they don't know what they're doing.
Morally? It sounds like he was just using snippets of code he wrote there to teach people CS.
That doesn't sound especially morally bankrupt to me. I know I've had professors who have done work for the DoD who have given lectures on how certain things were done within cruise missiles, etc., which seems a lot more ambiguous than code for the bloody fed.
On top of that, you get to write off your mortgage interest payments, so it's like 2%.
You can get investments that will guarantee you a 3% return. No reason to pay off your house with cash when there's better things to do with your money.
Also, it's a bit risky to have a paid-off house. A friend of mine is getting his assets attacked by the government because they know there's no mortgage company that will put up a stiff legal fight on his behalf. Asset forfeiture queen Margaret Mims (catchphrase: "Leading the charge against constitutionality!") is behind that one. He's not accused of any crime; they just want to take his assets since they're broke.
As any good academic, I left it as an exercise for the reader.
But since you asked so nicely: 1) It could be considered illegal streaming by Obama, or at the minimum, a breach of the Netflix TOS to give away your account password. 2) Your "Recently Watched" queue might get you in trouble, depending on your SO. There's some pretty hot movies on Netflix, such as Room in Rome, which is basically two naked women chatting and making out for 1.5 hours. I thought it was well-acted. My wife didn't. 3) If you are a person that uses the same password on all or multiple sites, you've now shared multiple passwords.
>>The only winners of this are the entities who don't have an internet presence, and don't care to.
Actually, I think you meant to say, "The only winners of this are lawyers", who will make an absolute fortune in bullshit takedown claims and takedown defenses.
The really sad part of this is, the people writing the legislation know this, and talked about it. They (Lamar Smith et al) *want* it to flood the court system with frivolous lawsuits.
Source: I watched the SOPA hearings, and nearly cried when they struck down various amendments that would stop the flood of lawsuits - such as forcing the loser to pay if their claims were total bullshit. The only amendment they approved was loser pays if the lawsuit was bullshit AND they can prove malice. Which they'll probably never be able to do.
Chaffetz, Issa, and the gentlelady from San Jose are heroes on this issue.
What I mean is, if I'm trying to study Java, or whatever, it doesn't benefit me any more if there's 2,000 textbooks instead of 200 good textbooks.
Once we get a good set of open source e-textbooks, it will eventually gut the publishing industry. Except for the cases where professors have written their own textbooks, I think most will start looking to helping their students out. Professors are humans too, after all.
>>It doesn't seem smart at all for Ubisoft to alienate their best customers, power gamers who probably make more hardware chances than anyone.
I haven't bought a Ubisoft game since they started all this DRM nonsense, and there's been a *lot* of games I was going to buy before I saw who made/published them.
They can all burn in hell, for all I care.
I haven't pirated software in a really long time, either. So they really are losing sales from this nonsensical DRM business.
Contrawise, a lot of people who believe in global warming think that by stopping trees from being chopped down and replanted, they are helping reduce our CO2 footprint.
>>Combine that with the fact that we could cover the entire country in corn and still not be independent of fossil fuels - it's a complete boondoggle.
Most boondoggles are simple wastes of time and money, that are usually political payoffs for people. While corn ethanol is all of this, it's also fucking the poor by driving food prices through the roof, reducing our mileage in cars, and not saving nearly as much CO2 as it was supposed to. (Ethanol's life cycle generates as much CO2 as a CNG car, even though it is touted as being CO2-neutral.)
While other forms of ethanol are much better than corn ethanol, that's what we got here in America.
Until we move our presidential primaries OUT OF IOWA, I suspect we'll continue this horrible, destructive policy.
>>This is executing people suspected of terrorism without trial.
Executing *citizens* suspected of terrorism without a trial.
If being a Citizen of the United States is worth *anything*, it means you can't be executed out of hand by the government without a trial. This is the very bedrock Natural Right that all the others are predicated on.
While in absentia trials are somewhat unconstitutional (we still do them when people don't show up for court - perhaps there's a better term for this), it's better than not having a single judge look at an execution order for someone who is not presenting a Clear and Present Danger to the United States.
If you're openly bearing arms against the US, then, yeah, sure, you've got nothing to complain about when the T-1000 comes knocking on your door. But merely engaging in anti-American speech is not a Clear and Present Danger, and may very well be a constitutionally protected activity, depending on the exact words spoken.
That's what judges are for, and why judge, jury, and executioner are divided powers.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, there's a fair amount of pushback on this.
Was looking at getting a dice roller on my phone, and one of the free apps I was looking at had a number of 1-star ratings because the dice roller needed access to dialing out, the internet, and who-knows-what-else.
The author of the app just put up an apologetic, "We need all those permissions on this app to get Google Ads to work", without bothering to fix the underlying cause. He didn't need all the permissions he was asking for.
A friend of mine gave an interesting talk on the subject of Android security at Defcon:
https://media.defcon.org/dc-19/presentations/O'Neil-Chin/DEFCON-19-O'Neil-Chin-Google-Android.pdf
In America, he's more famous for saying, "Laws are like sausages. It is better not to see them being made."
Though he probably never said it.
>>So no Americans then?
Uh, Bismarck is the capital of North Dakota.
He also runs a killer Chicken and Biscuit restaurant in between forays into the Atlantic to do some quality commerce raiding.
Checkmate, Europeans.
So subpoena his email records and find evidence of the real bribery.
His public statements make it sound probable that something like that has been going on behind the scenes.
It's not like we haven't done investigations like this before. Abscam, the Keating Five, and so forth.
>>fuck the origins of life
Indeed. Most life forms on Earth work this way!
Neat. I used to work for the UCSD Bioengineering department. Many, many smart people worked there. Much more so than the San Diego Supercomputer Center during the tech boom (half the people they hired during that time period were people who'd read a "Learn Programming in 30 Days" book, or whatever, because anyone with any skills were going into industry).
It's always nice to see their work getting press.
Not when you can buy a physical copy for $5!
>>18 years from now, you won't be able to legally play that game
18 years? They've been shutting down Madden servers after 18 months.
This is EA's wet dream rent-seeking business plan - being able to force people to buy the same game over and over each year. Maximum profits for minimum cost.
>>Have a non-insane pricing plan that actually decreases the cost of new games progressively as time goes on
Yeah, I looked at buying Oblivion a couple months back for my wife on the Xbox 360. Even though it's not moddable like the PC version, she's more comfortable on the couch.
They're still selling it for $30. o_O
(http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Oblivion/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d802425307d1)
My 30" display is quite capable of drawing all the rows on the spreadsheet for modestly large battles in Eve online.
While a planetarium-sized Excel spreadsheet would be impressive, you'd probably have trouble reading all the important bits of text in it.
"us to hoist a lot data currently stored"
I really wish I knew what this phrase meant. It sounds fascinating.
But seriously, if there's no performance gain from multithreading, it can be a really good idea to move away from the complexity of it. There's a lot of traps people can fall into with concurrent code if they don't know what they're doing.
Oh, lord. It's depressing how accurate I'm guessing that will be.
We The People is a joke.
Morally? It sounds like he was just using snippets of code he wrote there to teach people CS.
That doesn't sound especially morally bankrupt to me. I know I've had professors who have done work for the DoD who have given lectures on how certain things were done within cruise missiles, etc., which seems a lot more ambiguous than code for the bloody fed.
On top of that, you get to write off your mortgage interest payments, so it's like 2%.
You can get investments that will guarantee you a 3% return. No reason to pay off your house with cash when there's better things to do with your money.
Also, it's a bit risky to have a paid-off house. A friend of mine is getting his assets attacked by the government because they know there's no mortgage company that will put up a stiff legal fight on his behalf. Asset forfeiture queen Margaret Mims (catchphrase: "Leading the charge against constitutionality!") is behind that one. He's not accused of any crime; they just want to take his assets since they're broke.
Obama has made it a mission to eliminate illegal streaming. A while back, he was talking about it all the time.
It could become a felony.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/obama-ip-czar-wants-felony-charges-for-illegal-web-streaming.ars
As any good academic, I left it as an exercise for the reader.
But since you asked so nicely:
1) It could be considered illegal streaming by Obama, or at the minimum, a breach of the Netflix TOS to give away your account password.
2) Your "Recently Watched" queue might get you in trouble, depending on your SO. There's some pretty hot movies on Netflix, such as Room in Rome, which is basically two naked women chatting and making out for 1.5 hours. I thought it was well-acted. My wife didn't.
3) If you are a person that uses the same password on all or multiple sites, you've now shared multiple passwords.
Wait, it's okay to share your Netflix password...?
I can think of at least three reasons why that's a bad idea.
>>The only winners of this are the entities who don't have an internet presence, and don't care to.
Actually, I think you meant to say, "The only winners of this are lawyers", who will make an absolute fortune in bullshit takedown claims and takedown defenses.
The really sad part of this is, the people writing the legislation know this, and talked about it. They (Lamar Smith et al) *want* it to flood the court system with frivolous lawsuits.
Source: I watched the SOPA hearings, and nearly cried when they struck down various amendments that would stop the flood of lawsuits - such as forcing the loser to pay if their claims were total bullshit. The only amendment they approved was loser pays if the lawsuit was bullshit AND they can prove malice. Which they'll probably never be able to do.
Chaffetz, Issa, and the gentlelady from San Jose are heroes on this issue.
What I mean is, if I'm trying to study Java, or whatever, it doesn't benefit me any more if there's 2,000 textbooks instead of 200 good textbooks.
Once we get a good set of open source e-textbooks, it will eventually gut the publishing industry. Except for the cases where professors have written their own textbooks, I think most will start looking to helping their students out. Professors are humans too, after all.
You only need one good textbook for each subject, no?
The wiki textbook project actually has a lot of promise, too. (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page)
>>It doesn't seem smart at all for Ubisoft to alienate their best customers, power gamers who probably make more hardware chances than anyone.
I haven't bought a Ubisoft game since they started all this DRM nonsense, and there's been a *lot* of games I was going to buy before I saw who made/published them.
They can all burn in hell, for all I care.
I haven't pirated software in a really long time, either. So they really are losing sales from this nonsensical DRM business.
Contrawise, a lot of people who believe in global warming think that by stopping trees from being chopped down and replanted, they are helping reduce our CO2 footprint.
>>financial investors (the so-called âfinancialization of commoditiesâ) may have been partly responsible for the 2007/08 spike
Note the "partly" bit.
Corn ethanol is absolutely a driver of higher food prices. If you don't believe this, you haven't studied the issue enough.
>>Combine that with the fact that we could cover the entire country in corn and still not be independent of fossil fuels - it's a complete boondoggle.
Most boondoggles are simple wastes of time and money, that are usually political payoffs for people. While corn ethanol is all of this, it's also fucking the poor by driving food prices through the roof, reducing our mileage in cars, and not saving nearly as much CO2 as it was supposed to. (Ethanol's life cycle generates as much CO2 as a CNG car, even though it is touted as being CO2-neutral.)
While other forms of ethanol are much better than corn ethanol, that's what we got here in America.
Until we move our presidential primaries OUT OF IOWA, I suspect we'll continue this horrible, destructive policy.
>>This is executing people suspected of terrorism without trial.
Executing *citizens* suspected of terrorism without a trial.
If being a Citizen of the United States is worth *anything*, it means you can't be executed out of hand by the government without a trial. This is the very bedrock Natural Right that all the others are predicated on.
While in absentia trials are somewhat unconstitutional (we still do them when people don't show up for court - perhaps there's a better term for this), it's better than not having a single judge look at an execution order for someone who is not presenting a Clear and Present Danger to the United States.
If you're openly bearing arms against the US, then, yeah, sure, you've got nothing to complain about when the T-1000 comes knocking on your door. But merely engaging in anti-American speech is not a Clear and Present Danger, and may very well be a constitutionally protected activity, depending on the exact words spoken.
That's what judges are for, and why judge, jury, and executioner are divided powers.